Access Google Data Studio report programmatically using just the API?

Question

I'm wondering if it is somehow possible to display a private report if we don't have access to the account or company's Data Studio environment? Using the Google API would be ideal.

The reason why we need an API is because the reports need to be displayed on a distributed.network of displays where user interaction is not possible. They are all separated from each other and run on their own browser instance. Setting the reports public to embed them is not an option due to sensitive data being exposed to the inte.net. Embedding is fine but we need some way of accessing the customers data without user interaction, ie via access tokens or something. If the user authenticates to our app beforehand and that allows us to then use their access token inside of the embed iframe would be fine too.

As far as I can tell I cannot display private reports through the official google-data-studio API. I did find another stackoverflow link that mentions something about community connectors. Would this still be a solution to our problem if we don't own the reports itself? We are just displaying the reports but do not have access to their Google Cloud environment nor their data sources.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This is not supported by Google Data Studio.

In short, if you can't make your report public, and you can't authenticate to view it, you're out of luck.

The link you provided is much more a hack than a feature. It suggests you to make your data public with a custom authentication mechanism developed in a Community Connector that requires a token as parameter.

This way, your report will be available to anyone, however, since your report requires the token to work (a kind of password), it won't show any data to unauthorized users (those who don't provide a valid token).

Although it is possible, I think it requires so much effort to make it work, and, of course, it requires that you change the connector of your report. So 'yes', you need to own the report to connect to your data through the suggested Community Connector.