Sideview Utils (free internal use license): How to create a script in a dashboard that will post JSON data and interact with external REST API upon button click?

[alpna84]

I have created dashboard with a button using Sideview Utils. I want to call script or backend program on button click to post JSON data and interact with external REST API and want to display response back on dashboard.
I get data to be posted on button click using custom behavior.

I looked in to few questions related to it but still not clear the approach to be used for my requirement.
Can i achieve it using Sideview Utils?

[sideview · Accepted solution]

I can tell you more about the general area, and I'll try to update this answer again later based on our comments.

First, if you ultimately want to interact with an external REST API, meaning it's not a Splunk API, you'll have to first create a custom endpoint that is in the Splunk world and in the implementation thereof, proxy from that to your external API on the other host. Basically security settings in modern browsers prevent them from talking to any host beyond the one that served the HTML page.

However, I would start with the "Table" module documentation. Because this sort of question has historically been asked most as "How can I put buttons into my table rows and make happen when users click one of the buttons", the example that is most fleshed out is under the Table docs.

Specifically - "Module Documentation > The Table Module > Table - Embedding examples" . However I advise reading through the 4 preceding pages of Table examples at least a bit as the examples tend to build on eachother.

What you'll find, is a Table that has lots of green buttons "embedded" in it, and where clicking that button submits a request to a custom REST endpoint implemented in python, (whose config is within sideview_utils/default/web.conf and whose python code can be found at sideview_utils/appserver/controllers/example_controller.py)

However.. where it falls short of what you're asking
-- Obviously it's not hitting any external API - you'd have to implement that in your own controller and basically proxy out to wherever.
-- the example doesn't have anything that can interact with the response. In fact it just has a Redirector module send an Iframe to the given URL. If you need to interact with the JSON results, you would want to write a CustomBehavior instead and POST to the endpoint manually in there, etc.

You might consider writing a custom search command instead. You can marshal the return values from your API as key value pairs in Splunk search result set. this is a more common way of doing this believe it or not. You would push all this API complexity into the behavior of that search command, and then "consume the results" of the call by having the results come out as result rows with different key value pair "fields", that you can then interact with with more standard Sideview ui modules.

[alpna84]

Thanks for your response . I will look in to table embedding examples . Yes , it's not splunk API. I have further question , Can jquery library be used to interact with Rest api in custom behaviour , Does SideView util support that?

[sideview]

Certainly, yes. jquery is already there as a dependency of both Splunk's and Sideview's UI code, and you can make $.post and $.ajax calls as you would elsewhere. (Note that this won't help you get around the need to basically proxy from a splunk endpoint to your external api. )