The following video is demonstrating how you can connect Tableau to a REST API – LIVE – by making use of a 3rd party software (which needs to be licensed!). It is called Custom Connector SDK from Progress. It’s an SDK which you can think of as a framework which you can adjust to your REST API. Before I’m going to show how to leverage OpenAcess together with Tableau. I’m going to explain how the architectural flow looks like. The demo will then leverage a REST API which contains stock data.

Ressources/Call to Action:

• Download the workbook from the video
• 2-hour tutorial for Custom ODBC
• Start to embed Tableau (Video)
• Tableau Developer

Special thanks to the whole Progress team! Great attitude, very responsive and I really enjoyed a great webinar with you guys today! Thank you Sumit Sarkar, Saikrishna Bobba, Nishanth Kadiyala, Dennis Bennett, Dennis Bennett, Dipak Patel, Petya Popova-Chilikova, Michael Burritt, Kim Bears and John Fremer! Looking forward to more great customer cases in the future!

Due to the positive feedback of the write back extension from the video below I want to equip IT FOLKS with the right tools to setup the same environment on their machines for POC kind of situations as fast as possible. Please be aware of the fact that I might be referencing absolute paths in the code which means in order to be up and running as fast as possible you might want to copy the code to the exact same folder I did (C:)

Download and unzip this content: writeBackV1.3(incl XAMPP and MySQL DB)

1. Install – tableau-setup-std-main.18.0208.2310-x64.exe
2. Copy “WriteBackV1.3.trex” into “Extensions” within your “MyDocuments” folder
3. Extract xampp directly into your C: drive
4. Start XAMPP – Apache MySql and Tomcat
5. Start the “05 Start this BAT – Start Tableau Main (with Extension in Debug Mode).bat”
6. Open this workbook in exactly the instance from above – Extension API – Write Back v1.3.twbx
7. Open Chromium (exact same version as provided in the pre-release webpage) – To Remote Debug your Extension

Optional:

• Download all the tools needed to develop: Tools needed to develop.7z
• Get the latest Tableau cabable Extension PreReleases by joining Tableau’s Developer Preview
• If you want to setup your own webserver + database you can also download just the TREX file + Extension here

Cheers,
TT

The video below is demonstrating how you could leverage Tableau’s Extension API to save a tremendous amount of time in your planning and forecasting processes. This is done by coding a Tableau Extension which is actually writing back data into your transactional database (e.g. CRM system) directly from within a Tableau Dashboard!

I’m looking forward to get your feedback on it!
Cheers,
TT

P.S. Interested in the workbook? Here you go: Interested in the Extension? Let me know ;)

Do you want to combine different SAP BW Queries on a single Tableau Dashboard? Well, having multiple next to each other on a dashboard is not a problem at all, but how can you make them interact with each other? This is exactly what this blog post is going to demonstrate:

• If you’re working on a single SAP BW Query and you want to filter from one sheet to another you can do this in the the exact same way you’re used to use relational data sources (Use Sheet as Filter)
• If you’re using 2 different SAP BW Queries, filtering from one to another get’s a little bit more “tricky”
• The following video shows you how to interact with multiple SAP BW Queries on a Single Tableau Dashboard.

1. Option: Normal Action Filter
This works if both Queries are using the same unique remote name (Tableau terminology; Right click on a dimension within the Data Pane in Tableau Desktop -> Describe Field)
e.g: [0D_NW_CNTRY].[0D_NW_CNTRY].[LEVEL01]

2. Option: URL Action
The problem here is that this will open up a new tab if you don’t follow a “workaround” like:  Opening dashboard links in same browser window

3. Option: URL Action + Web Page Object
This is my preferred solution so feel free to directly jump to min 3:35 of the tutorial video above

Download the workbook here:
Tableau + SAP BW (Filter options on 2 seperated Queries)
(The ZIP file does just contain the *.twb file. I was trying to use SAP BW sample queries only. I’m interested to hear if they work for everyone once you’ve changed

• TABLEAUSERVER to your <YOUR TABLEAU SERVER URL> and
• the SAP BW connection to your testing environment

Cheers,
TT