Tableau Integration Requirements

The following are the prerequisites necessary for Automatic Data Lineage to connect to the Tableau third-party system, which you may choose to do at your sole discretion.

Note that while these are usually sufficient to connect to this third-party system, we cannot guarantee that the connection or integration will be successful since we have no control, liability, or responsibility for third-party products or services, including for their performance.

The scanner can automatically extract workbooks and data sources from Tableau Online and Tableau Server instances or they can be extracted manually and put into the directory where Automatic Data Lineage expects to find the files for lineage analysis.

The following requirements must be met for the scanner to automatically to extract the data.

• Tableau Online or Tableau Server accessible from the internet

  • Versions as of 10.3 (May 2017) are supported

• Tableau REST API is enabled

• Connection parameters

  • URL of the Tableau Server
  • Credentials — either username and password or Personal Access Token

• A user with the appropriate permissions (see below)

The extraction via Manta Flow Agent is supported as of version R42.1. See Manta Flow Agent Configuration for Extraction for details.

Providing Input Data Manually

The following requirements must be met to process files provided manually.

• The files are placed in $MANTA_DIR/cli/temp/tableau/{sitename}/{projectname} where the sitename is the name of the site (set in the Automatic Data Lineage connection) and the projectname is the name of the project the workbook or data source is in.
• The site name should match the name of the original site from which the items were downloaded. Otherwise, shared data sources may not work.
• Workbooks are downloaded as TWB or TWBX.
• Shared ("published") data sources are downloaded as TDS or TDSX.
• A project can be nested inside another project (projectname1/projectname2), but there has to be at least one project.

To download a workbook or data source from Tableau Server, locate it inside its parent project, click on the three dots next to its name, and select Download. (Alternatively, open — view, not edit — the workbook and click on the three dots next to its name.)

It's also possible to serve workbooks created on Tableau Desktop that are not part of any site on any server. Create the same file structure as described above (.../tableau/{sitename}/{projectname}) with any site name and any project name.

Permissions

To download workbooks and data sources, Automatic Data Lineage needs the credentials of a user with access to them. The user must have one of the following roles.

• Explorer (can publish) or higher — users with roles lower than Site Administrator must have permission to download each workbook and data source to be analyzed (this setting has to be applied to each workbook separately)
  
• Site Administrator, which always has permission to download everything

Supported Features

• Workbooks

  • Worksheets, dashboards, stories

  • Row and column shelves

  • Properties of the chart set on the marks card (color, angle, size, etc.)

  • Filters and pages

  • “Measure Values” and “Measure Names”

  • Workbooks and data sources in the user's personal space - as of R42.7

• Data sources

  • Published data sources as well as data sources that are part of a workbook

  • Connection to a database (PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL, DB2, etc.)

    • Either using custom SQL or loading the entire data set

  • Connection to a file (CSV, XLSX, etc.)

  • User-defined calculations

  • Sets

  • Groups

  • Parameters (not SQL, see below)

  • Geographical data

  • Extracts

  • Joins

  • Union

  • Pivot

Known Limitations

• Datasources that are not used in any workbook are not extracted and analyzed.

• The scanner is able to process workbooks created in Tableau version 10.3 (May 2017) and newer. Older workbooks may work as well, but an error might appear in the analysis.

• Initial SQL is not supported.

• There is a known issue with connecting to two or more sheets from one Excel file.

• Tableau Prep is not supported.

• Reference and intersection filters are not supported.

• Connections using stored procedures are not supported.

• Connections to Hive are not supported.