Show variable section woth embedded or standalone dashboard

I just discovered that when using a dashboard embedded within an IFRAME or standalone with the URL, the variable section with the drop-down selector for the defined variables is not shown. You need to pass variables on the URL with var-MYVAR=abc …

Is there any way to show the variable section to add interactivity in the dashboard if we are not in the grafana development environment ?

What I liked is that the variable selector is feeded through a datasource. I could make my own dropdown outside the Iframe and refresh it with the variable values selected, but I was hoping there was a way to use the variable rendering facility the we see in the dashboard editor.