One thing that I realised in Austin: I’m not a Tableau Desktop guy. I’m struggling sometimes even with the easiest densification calcs and my dashboards generally suck. What can I do? Learn Desktop, deep dive and share my findings. Well, I did and the results are below.
Going back to Austin. I spend two hours in the Hackatlon with a Tableau employee called Paul Howie. While he wrote a clever password manager (LastPass) integration to Tableau Desktop I spent most of my time to understand Desktop’s architecture especially the Qt GUI layer (but at the end of the day I did integrate Sever with LastPass as well). We were both pissed off that we did not make into the top three? Honestly, how many people struggle with copying pass database password to Desktop (a lot) vs integration Amazon Alexa with a 3rd party commercial product (a few). And there is no better motivation than resentment (hear me, Ben Lower?) so I started to plan my ultimate solution to open up Tableau Desktop as platform for the masses.
So this is the first part of my journey to write a web REST API for Tableau Desktop (yes, in Tableau Desktop, yes a Tableau REST API) starting with the basics. At the end of this series you will able to inject a web server into Desktop and call tabdoc commands from a nice web UI. Let’s get started.
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