External data on report

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Hi Martin,

depending on the amount of data you could (probably) add a calculated column and prepare the external data in html to display more than one column. But you dismissed this anyway and I wouldn't use this approach either.

As far as I know there's no suitable workaround, especially if you want to use features like filtering for internal and external data. If you need something like this you have to consolidate the data with some intermediate system before it can be rendered to the user.
Maybe you can use Power BI for this and embed the Power BI Desktop inside a dashboard. I have no experience with Power BI myself so this is only a guess. Otherwise you would need to build a custom web application...

Best regards,
Daniel

Power BI is not an option plus I'm not really skilled in it. I'm also not able to develop a custom web application so I don't even know where would I start. :(

I suspect something like described above it's not possible but I would really like to hear it from someone who knows for sure. :)

Hm maybe this could be solved if we could create reports based on data sources. There's already an option to create reports for data sources of type dictionary/documents. Of course, a feature like this can not be guaranteed to perform well in all conditions but it would help. This isn't an option for solving your problem but could be a new feature request. :)

While waiting for an official answer to your question. You could look for alternatives. How will this report be used and by whom? How much data is there? Which security concerns are there? Does it have to be live data? Isn't there already a reporting tool in place to which these report could be added instead?

Depending on these answers there could be workarounds like:
Updating an excel file in SharePoint so that it can be viewed in the browser.
Is it a limited number of users, so you could create a prepared sql view which is retrieved in excel by the users themselves.

Just keep in mind that each tool has it limits and stretching these to far will only invoke the wrath of the users. SharePoint taught me this lesson very well. :)