Calling Tableau API with an embedded user - tableau-api

I'm currently utilizing tableau API to embed graphs published onto our server. Our server doesn't allow guest users because of company polices, but the server is internal, and one of the graphs we have is suposed to be shares with anyone willing to see it. The problem is that not everyone have access to Tableau Server, because we are charger by each user, monthly.
So the question is, is it possible to embed a specific user's authentication into a webpage?
Another question is, if it is possible, does the user have a limit of multiple connections at the same time?

One solution is to export your visualizations as static images which you then make available via a traditional web page. You can automate the image capture on a schedule easily, say by appending .png to the Tableau Server viz url and using a script to request the image and save to disk periodically. That way the image can stay up to date with data changes.
This produces static images without interactivity, but it respects the license agreement.

Related

Detect stream in data load editor in Qlik Sense

Is it possible to get stream related information in data load editor in Qlik Sense App? I cannot create new apps. I can access other information like app id, app path etc.
The stream that an application is published in, to the best if my knowledge, is not available by a System function within the load script. You can certainly pull that information from the Repository API inline. The obvious candidate for doing so would be the monitor_apps_REST_app data connection which should be present on your system. You should be able to pass the combination of DocumentName() as a variablized WHERE clause into the REST connection pull and then store the stream name or ID.
What is the ultimate use case?

Client with two servers

I'm a NEW Android developer. I'm developing a client-server app. I'm using free online host for my PHP & mySQL. My app will involve with data & images (both upload & download).
Since I'm using free hosting service, there are limitations (namely storage). I'm thinking of using two separate free hosts. One for the data and one for the images. I understand that I'll need to get data from one host and images from another. There will be multiple POSTs & GETs to complete a process. My images are stored on the server as actual images (not BLOB). I'll have to make HTTP post & get the images anyway once the links are provided/retrieved from the first post.
Do you think it's a bad idea?

Need advice: How to share a potentially large report to remote users?

I am asking for advice on possibly better solutions for the part of the project I'm working on. I'll first give some background and then my current thoughts.
Background
Our clients can use my company's products to generate potentially large data sets for use in their industry. When the data sets are generated, the clients will file a processing request to us.
We want to send the clients a summary email which contains some statistical charts as well as sampling points from the data sets so they can do some initial quality control work. If the data sets are of bad quality, they don't need to file any request.
One problem is that the charts and sampling points can be potentially too large to be sent in an email. The charts and the sampling points we want to include in the emails are pictures. Although we can use low-quality format such as JPEG to save space, we cannot control how many data sets would be included in the summary email, so the total size could still exceed the normal email size limit.
In terms of technologies, we are mainly developing in Python on Ubuntu 14.04.
Goals of the Solution
In general, we want to present a report-like thing to the clients to do some initial QA. The report may contains external links but does not need to be very interactive. In other words, a static report should be fine.
We want to reduce the steps or things that our clients must do to read the report. For example, if the report can be just an email, the user only needs to 1). log in and 2). open the email. If they use a client software, they may skip 1). and just open and begin to read.
We also want to minimize the burden of maintaining extra user accounts for both us and our clients. For example, if the solution requires us to register a new user account, this solution is, although still acceptable, not ranked very high.
Security is important because our clients don't want their reports to be read by unauthorized third parties.
We want the process automated. We want the solution to provide programming interface so that we can automate the report sending/sharing process.
Performance is NOT a critical issue. Our user base is not large. I think at most in hundreds. They also don't generate data that frequently, at most once a week. We don't need real-time response. Even a delay of a few hours is still acceptable.
My Current Thoughts of Solution
Possible solution #1: In-house web service. I can set up a server machine and develop our own web service. We put the report into our database and the clients can then query via the Internet.
Possible solution #2: Amazon Web Service. AWS is quite mature but I'm not sure if they could be expensive because so far we just wanna share a report with our remote clients which doesn't look like a big deal to use AWS.
Possible solution #3: Google Drive. I know Google Drive provides API to do uploading and sharing programmatically, but I think we need to register a dedicated Google account to use that.
Any better solutions??
You could possibly use AWS S3 and Cloudfront. Files can easily be loaded into S3 using the AWS SDK's and API. You can then use the API to generate secure links to the files that can only be opened for a specific time and optionally from a specific IP.
Files on S3 can also be automatically cleaned up after a specific time if needed using lifecycle rules.
Storage and transfer prices are fairly cheap with AWS and remember that the S3 storage cost indicated is by the month so if you only have an object loaded for a few days then you only pay for a few days.
S3: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing
Cloudfront: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
Here's a list of the SDK's for AWS:
https://aws.amazon.com/tools/#sdk
Or you can use their command line tools for Windows batch or powershell scripting:
https://aws.amazon.com/tools/#cli
Here's some info on how the private content urls are created:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/PrivateContent.html
I will suggest to built this service using mix of your #1 and #2 options. You can do the processing and for transferring the data leverage AWS S3 which is quiet cheap.
Example: 100GB costs like approx $3.
Also AWS S3 will be beneficial as you are covered for any disaster on your local environment your data will be safe in S3.
For security you can leverage data encryption and signed URLS in AWS S3.

While scaling up, how to make user uploaded files available accross multiple servers?

I have a website in which users would upload various and later access them.
The files are stored in a specific path in the server at this point. Now if I need to have multiple servers for the website, what is the best way to make the user uploaded files accessible across multiple servers. Amazon s3 is one option that has crossed my mind. What other options do I have?
First, you can try using a CDN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network).
Also, you can make it in house, by having specialized servers setup for static content. You will need maybe a lookup server, to know for each file on what server can be found. It will also contain the logic to determine what is the best server to use to save the file. This is more complicated, as you will have to make the load balancing and take care of geographic location of users.

is there a service or software for metering data downloads

We have a range of web applications here that allow users to download selected data from a number of databases and online services. Mainly Environmental information. We can track users visiting web pages using tools like Piwik or Google Analytics. We also want to track the amount of resource or data that they use, possibly also applying limits to record downloads.
If this was a single DB system we could track rows delivered within the db. However here we have a SOA with a range of sources and sinks. What I envisage is a service that can be messaged by other systems to register or track the amount of a resource used.
e.g User Andrew was sent 125MB of water quality data.
The central data metering service tracks usage messages from a variety of sources, produces reports and where appropriate applies caps or billing limits.
This service might be expanded to include processing as well as data download.
I would consider this to be a not unusual requirement but I can't find much in the way of existing software for it - perhaps because I am not using the correct terminology.
SO my questions:
What would you call this service - what keywords will lead me to existing systems?
What solutions already exist in this area - in particular FOSS or cloud based systems?
Could something like Google Analytics be persuaded to operate in this fashion?
It would be possible to do with the measurement protocol from Google Universal Analytics in conjunction with the user id feature in Analytics and one or more custom dimensions.
The measurement protocol is a language agnostic vaguely REST-like (inasfar as you send a bunch of parameters to an endpoint) protocol to send tracking data to the Google servers.
User id is a feature to recognize authenticated users across devices and multiple visits.
If the various parts of your setup send http calls build to the measurement protocol and include the user id to recognize the user and a value for a custom dimension for the file size (or rather a custom metric if you want to have sums and averages) and maybe a custom dimension for the file name you can send this to you Analytics account and build a custom report for downloads.
Note that the user id is an internal id that is used to link together visits by the same user from multiple devices - it is not something that shows up in the reports that would allow you to report on individual users in the Analytics interface (if you want that you need to include another id as custom dimension, and you have to check with the Google TOS what kind of id is allowed). Plus you'd need a dedicated data view in GA for sessions with a user id which will not show unauthenicated users.