I wanted to publish tableau reports via tab cmd commands and was able to do it successfully, one concern I have is "Connecting the twbx file to a data source' via tabcmd commands.
Following are the commands which I used to :
Login to tableau server :
tabcmd.exe login --server http://serverName --user "userName" --password "password" --site ""
Publishing Tableau reports to the Tableau server :
publish -c "E:\Tableau\ActualReportName.twbx" -n "new Report name.twbx" --project ProjectName --db-user "DBuserName" --db-password "DBpassword"
Although I have given my db credentials while publishing reports, I have nowhere mentioned the DB server Name and DB Name for that matter from which the twbx files would fetch the data.
I have multiple DB's using the same credentials, is there any way in TabCmd to specify the Db server Name and DB name from which reports would fetch data from?
Any help in this would be great!
Unless you have a pressing reason, I'd publish a .twb file instead of a .twbx file
The first thing I'd look into is Tableau servers support for publishing data sources that your published workbook can connect to via the Tableau server. That will allow you to embed your credentials in the shared data source and to update the workbooks and the connections in separate steps. That is especially useful if the data connection and the workbooks change at different tempos.
The unsupported hack is to have your script update the twb file before publishing. It's just an XML file and the info you want to change should be with the data connection details. If you go this route, standard disclaimers apply. Save backups. Don't modify the original, generate a revised version, expect to have to tweak your script when Tableau versions change, etc. still it's not too hard to make sense of their XML. You could probably do it with just a few lines of XSLT, but even a simple string replacement might be good enough.
Still I'd go with a shared data source over hacking the TWB internals in almost all cases.
Related
I use Metabase to generate dashboards and reports. I need to generate files using the scheduler and instead of sending them by e-mail, I need to make them available in SFTP. Do you have any suggestion on how to automate this processes ?
I use PostgreSQL as a database source.
I can also try other open source tools if needed.
I didn't find much information on how to do it yet.
we are using 2018.3 version of Tableau Server. The server stats like user login, and other stats are getting logged into PostgreSQL DB. and the same being cleared regularly after 1 week.
Is there any API available in Tableau to connect the DB and take backup of data somewhere like HDFS or any place in Linux server.
Kindly let me know if there are any other way other than API as well.
Thanks.
You can enable access to the underlying PostgreSQL repository database with the tsm command. Here is a link to the documentation for your (older) version of Tableau
https://help.tableau.com/v2018.3/server/en-us/cli_data-access.htm#repository-access-enable
It would be good security practice to limit access to only the machines (whitelisted) that need it, create or use an existing read-only account to access the repository, and ideally to disable access when your admin programs are complete (i.e.. enable access, do your query, disable access)
This way you can have any SQL client code you wish query the repository, create a mirror, create reports, run auditing procedures - whatever you like.
Personally, before writing significant custom code, I’d first see if the info you want is already available another way, in one of the built in admin views, via the REST API, or using the public domain LogShark or TabMon systems or with the Addon (for more recent versions of Tableau) the Server Management Add-on, or possibly the new Data Catalog.
I know at least one server admin who somehow clones the whole Postgres repository database periodically so he can analyze stats offline. Not sure what approach he uses to clone. So you have several options.
I have done a lot of research on the file types of tableau but I would still like to know more about some file extensions
What is the relation between twbx and tdsx?
Is twbx file : twb + tde file OR twb+tde+tds file ?
What would be the main difference between tds and tdsx file ?
How to use a tps(preferences) file in tableau workbook?
can all the file extensions be used on server or only some ?
twbx contains the workbook including a copy of all the data that you connected your workbook to, while a tdsx contains connection information to remote data sources (Server IPs, tables, etc) as well as any local data that somebody else wouldn't have access to otherwise (eg. an Excel file on your computer). No dashboards are involved. https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/export_connection.html
A twbx is a twb with a tde file if you want. Remote and local data is stored within your workbook so that other people can access it https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/save_savework_packagedworkbooks.html
a tds only includes references to data sources but no actual data, so if you connect to a local excel file and it is not accessible via a network, a colleague of yours won't be able to use this file to get the data. A tdsx includes these datasets so you can share it. https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/export_connection.html
A tps contains custom colour palettes, how you can use it can be found here: https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/formatting_create_custom_colors.html
Generally all files that you can connect to with Tableau Desktop can be accessed via the server (assuming that the server can access them, ie. the files or sources are on the network). You might however be required to install additional drivers on the server to access for example SAP BW. These drivers are not contained in the default installation.
I have a .twb file created using the excel data source that is located in some network file path.
On publishing to server I get this error.
How to resolve this?
I need to provide some access for "Run as user" in my server machine,how could I do that ?
Ensure that when the workbook is created, a connection to the Excel file is created using the full UNC path
Ensure that the Tableau Server Run As user is able to access that file using the UNC path specified in the workbook. An easy way to test this would be to open Windows Explorer as the Run As user, then paste in the UNC path. If the Excel file opens, then you're good to go.
If you still have issues, test access to the file while logged into the Tableau server to make sure there is no firewall or port blocking access from that host. Often Excel isn't installed on servers for security reasons, so the test is not whether Excel opens the file, but whether you can view the contents from the server as the Run As User, even just using the type command at the console.
If you can't get your network access fixed, an alternative is to build and publish extracts to the server. There are multiple ways to accomplish that
We deployed a VB.Net application on a customer's computer that contains SSRS reports.
The application connects to the SQL Server database in the app without any problems. We installed SQL Server Data Tools so we could deploy the reports (rdl) and data source (rdl) files up to the report server. These deploy without any problems.
In SQL Server Data Tools we can "Preview" the reports without any problems as well.
We do run into a problem when attempting to view the report from Internet Explorer (run as an administrator).
We get the following error:
Cannot create a connection to data source 'DataSourceReports'
(this is the name we used for the TargetDataSourceFolder)
error:40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server
We also get the same error when the app we deployed runs the reports.
Please let us know what is not set up correctly on the SQL Server side.
A likely possibility is that you are experiencing a double hop authentication problem. It's not clear from your explanation, but is the SQL Server database on a separate server from the report server? If so, then your credentials allow you to connect to the report server but Windows integrated security does not pass those credentials on to the SQL Server database if you are using NTLM on the report server. The report server tries to use Kerberos on your network to authenticate by way of ticketing to the SQL Server database, but you must have this configured correctly on your network. See this article if you want to use Kerberos: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff679930(v=sql.100).aspx.
Another (easier) solution is to open the data source on the report server and change the authentication to use stored credentials. Make sure the credentials you use have read permission on the SQL Server database. The downside of this approach is that you cannot use row-level security in your report by user unless you design your report to capture user information and set up the query or a filter on the dataset to restrict data by user. If that's not a concern, the stored credentials are easy to set up and maintain - and you're going to have to do this anyway if you want to use caching, snapshots, or subscriptions. For more information on stored credentials, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159736.aspx.