Displaying Qlik Sense on unattended devices

[mmarchese]

On the factory floor, I have a number of TVs with Chromebits in kiosk mode displaying web dashboards through the Rise Vision app.  It has worked great for years with some simple web apps that I coded myself from scratch.  Now that I have access to Qlik Sense, I want to replace these home-grown dashboards with more powerful and pretty QS ones.

The problem is that these Chromebits need to somehow log into Qlik to be able to show anything, and I'm not sure how to do this without requiring a person's involvement.

One way would be to pass a username and password to Qlik via a URL, but I can't find anyone saying that it's is possible except for in this one post - and that person did it via a workaround that I don't fully understand:  Custom login page can skip Windows authentication popup in every browser but Firefox

Someone else at my company found success by using a Raspberry Pi instead and using a Chrome Extension to automatically fill out the username and password prompt when it appears.  As it stands, it seems that I must either figure out how to do the same for Chromebits or abandon them and duplicate what he did via the Pi.

However, this all seems like it ought to be simpler and less hacky.  Surely, we can't be the first company to want to display Qlik Sense dashboards on passive, unattended devices.  Are we overcomplicating things?  Is there a standard way of doing this?

[QlikFix]

@mmarchese i see now response or further comments here. did you receive direct contact? otherwise, what path did you choose with Qlik in dashboard mode?

i also find it hard to believe there is minimal inquiry in such formats. i am looking to setup a couple interactive QlikSense dashboards per business request and would like to use Windows 10 Kiosk mode. i am not familiar enough with the program to know if it would be best to use the app or browser interface. my users are using via browser (chrome i believe).

@Anonymous any advisement on Kiosk configuration?

[mmarchese]

@QlikFix No, I didn't get a response here and didn't try other channels.

For me, the authorization headaches became irrelevant, because I found that Qlik Sense was just a poor tool for signage in general:

1) To get something to look nice on a TV, especially from far away, you need tight control over formatting: fonts, line thicknesses, zoom, spacing, etc.  Qlik Sense is not geared toward that.  It's geared toward giving you very little formatting options in exchange for giving you pretty nice-looking visualizations with zero effort.  Their goal seems to be simplicity.  They do give you the ability to customize the look of your dashboards via custom themes, but that requires knowledge of CSS/HTML/JavaScript.  There are some extensions that give you more styling options without needing to write any code, but it may not be enough.

2) At least through our vendor, there is no "kiosk" license.  So each display you want to show Qlik content on requires a full-blown, expensive license.

3) I needed to show the same Qlik Sense app on different displays but with different sets of filters on each display.  So I wanted to pass filter arguments in via the URL.  If I remember right, I could never get it working, though I think it's supposedly possible.

I ended up abandoning Qlik Sense for signage and sticking to my homegrown website, which displays data in tables made via this JavaScript library: http://tabulator.info/.  I gather data via SQL queries, leaving Qlik out of it.

[QlikFix]

@mmarchese thank you for sharing status and additional info on your approach. personally, i have little experience with QlikSense. i am working on setting up the whse displays for the team that is creating the Qlik views. initial plan is to have these touch displays running via Windows 10 clients using browser interface to Qlik. i will set the PCs to autologon and stay awake. apparently Qlik will timeout if not interactive, so if my pc stay awake utility doesn't handle this also, then may need to use the Chrome extension that helps with this.

my intent for kiosk mode was to lockdown the pc/displays to the Qlik views only amongst other kiosk controls.

for another project, company info displays i am looking to upgrade from a homegrown solution (using Xibo) to a company app service (uses Xuniplay). supposedly, some have used this to display interactive Qlik Sense views. thus, i will look at that and share experiences here later.