We’re using contour dashboards for for end users as they’re quick to build for ad-hoc requests and don’t require ontologizing data that doesn’t have a wide use, but there are a few notable limitations to contour, being:
We can’t embed contour’s directly in Carbon (we can hyperlink them, but rendering them within the workspace is preferred
Branching is not supported, so for widely used dashboards, edits are made on the primary version. (Hoping these are included in Foundry Branching soon)
Contour has no version control (so edits are lost forever - this is not ideal for productionalized dashboards)
As an temporary alternative I wanted to see if we could iframe the contour dashboards into a workshop module (then we could manage versions of the contour via duplicating existing versions).
There’s a url parameter on the contour dashboard ( ?embedded=true ) which removes the Foundry sidebar however the header with the project breadcrumbs still appears. Is there a more direct way to iframe just in the contour dashboard content?
Also - is Contour on the roadmap for foundry branching?
Thank you for these insights! The feedback has been passed on to the Foundry Branching and Contour teams. We’re working through some high urgency integrations until the end of the year, but we’re happy to revisit in 2026.
FYI. I stumbled across something while going through an old use case. In the legacy object view, you could actually embedd a specific board from a selected contour and also pass in overwrite parameters used as the variables in that contour board (no breadcrumbs, side panel, etc.). Not a full contour dashboard, but just a specific board within that contour.
I don’t think this will help you here, since iFrame is nowadays the only option you have to embedd a contour in workshop. But I still felt it’s worth sharing
Thanks Phil! I’m really glad you pointed this out - I did a little more digging and I think some of that functionality was carried over to Notepad - It looks like we can embed contour widgets in notepad and embed that notepad document in Contour. (Though this is still pretty limited in terms of passing parameters down for filtering as we lose the dynamic dropdown based on available values, it could work.) Thanks again!
Right, there is also the notepad option! It‘s a shame that you can’t pass in overwrite parameters (is that so really? ).
Thinking about it, this was actually a very convenient way how to just visualize a simple dataset in workshop without having the need to go fully bonkers and create an OT for every small thing you want to show.
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