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.
Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to visit some of my new and old customers in the sunny Bay Area. To make it more interesting I opted for a short presentation at Netflix to talk about Tableau Server Architecture, Abstract Query Caching and Fusion plus dashboard optimisation. I was super jetlagged but still I enjoyed a lot.
Tableau’s Javascript API evolves fast. In just a few versions we have arrived from the basic embedding to an event based, fully asynchronous API. Maybe the last, missing piece was accessing the summary and underlying data (however most of us used the
In this short tutorial I will go thru the basic steps of creating a project that uses Tableau JavaScript API. My intent is to show non-developers how the typical implementation workflow looks like. Obviously, there are multiple ways to achieve the same goals but the way of implementing new web applications is pretty much the same. Let me share my flow and show how I usually setup a development environment, embed a view and capture parameter and event changes. I will use my 
Last week I had the opportunity to show some of our solutions at ISATUG (International Server Administration Tableau User Group). One of my topics was graceful restart, because, yes, I still find it so useful that I want to share this goodie as much as I can. And to share something that actually works in practice I wrote a small plugin for our very-best Palette Enterprise Tabadmin (we call it pet) distribution that works standalone and can do the graceful restart magic what I explained in Graceful Restart 
Graceful restart, the promise of restarting core components like vizqlserver without impacting the users. As of now there is no official support from Tableau Software to do black magic like this, but yes, you aren’t here for official supported stuff. You are here for actual solutions. Considering that you know how Tableau Server’s 
Tableau Software is continuously working on Server’s architecture to make it more robust, modern and enterprise grade. However, it still has its design heritage and technical dept that make some tasks too complex or uncomfortable. One of these is the way how minor and major configuration changes can be applied. Even if we made tiny changes like enabling repository’s readonly user or allowing peeps to access systeminfo.xml we do need a complete server restart.
