Share a chart by link

Make a link

1. On Trends, save the view you want to share with Save Current View - its tags, its time range and its colours. A link shows up to 10 tags, the most a view holds.
2. In the same views menu, choose Manage All Views and press the link icon beside the view.
3. Give each tag the name the reader should see - the tag's own description is filled in where it has one, so plc7/db12.temp_ist can be Boiler temperature on the page. A tag you leave blank is shown as Tag 1, Tag 2 and so on, never by its own name. Pick how long the link works, and whether the page shows your account's name - the dialog shows the name itself. An account signed up without a company name is named by its email address, which a link's page never shows.
4. Press Make link and copy it. It is shown once: we keep only a fingerprint of it, so it cannot be shown again. If it is lost, revoke it and make a new one.

Making a link takes an Editor or Admin of the account, signed in to the Explorer. An API key cannot make one: putting your data in front of people outside the account is a person's decision.

What the person with the link sees

• The title you gave it, and your account's name only if you chose to show it.
• The view's tags under the names you gave them - Tag 1, Tag 2 and so on for any you left blank - with their units. The tags' own names are never sent to the page.
• The view's time range as it was when you made the link. “Last 24 hours” moves with the clock and the page updates itself - every minute for two days or less, every five minutes for longer; a fixed range stays as you saved it. Over a long range the lines are hourly or daily averages, and the page says so.
• When the link stops working.

Nothing else: no other tag or view, no settings, no statistics, no way to change anything. The person needs no account and signs in to nothing, and the page stores nothing in their browser.

When you change the view

A link shows the tags the view had when you made it, under the names you gave them then. Removing a tag from the view takes it off the link at once and for good. Adding a tag to the view does not put it on the link - not a new tag, and not one you removed earlier - so a view you widen for your own analysis next month stays as narrow as it was for everyone you sent the link to. To share the tag, make a new link. Renaming a tag keeps it on the link, under the name you gave it. Deleting the view deletes its links.

The time range and the colours are the view's as they were when you made the link, too: changing them on the view does not change the link, so narrowing a view from 30 days to 24 hours does not narrow what the link shows. To show a different range, make a new link and revoke the old one. Settings lists the range each link shows.

How long a link works

90 days unless you choose otherwise, and at most a year. There is no “never”: the link nobody remembers sending is the risk with any link, so every link runs out unless someone decides it should go on. An expired link stays in your list, marked expired, for 30 days, and is then deleted.

Revoke a link

Under Settings, Read-only links lists every link of the account: which view it shows, who made it and when, when it was last opened and when it runs out. Anyone on the account can see the list; an Editor or Admin can revoke a link there or from the view, and it stops working with the very next request. Every link made and revoked is in the account's audit log.

Plans

If your plan changes to one without links, your links are paused - they answer as if they did not exist - and they work again, unchanged, when the plan has links again. Nothing is deleted. The same happens while a deletion of the account is pending: the links stop at once and work again if the deletion is cancelled. Settings marks paused links and says why. An account can have up to 100 links.

Security

• The secret part of a link comes after the #. Browsers never send that part to any server - not ours, not a proxy on the way, not to the next site in a Referer - so it does not end up in anyone's logs. The page hands it to our API in a request header, never in an address.
• We store only a one-way fingerprint of each link, the way we store API keys, so a copy of our database opens nothing.
• A link opens this one chart and nothing else. It is not an API key, and no other part of the API accepts it.
• The chart is never kept by a cache on the way, the page is not indexed by search engines, and it cannot be shown inside another site.
• A link can be opened 120 times a minute from everywhere together, and 60 times a minute from one network address - plenty for an office of screens, and a ceiling on what a leaked link can cost.