February 11, 2020
#TableauTipTuesday - How to float an entire dashboard and a filter
In this week's tip, I show you just how to accomplish this.
October 23, 2014
Facebook Jeopardy: My extract has been failing for the last 3 days and I just noticed
My extract has been failing for the last 3 days and I just noticed.Anyone that uses Tableau Server can benefit from this hack. Our admin team created this awesome tool that monitors the extract refreshes on Server and sends us notifications once extracts complete or fail. Imagine a life where you have trigger kicking off your extracts and you have a service that monitors your extracts; that's what we have and it freaking awesome!
While we cannot share the code for this (it's built on our internal code stack anyway), the idea and the implementation is quite simple. A couple weeks ago, I was at Tableau HQ and did a deeper dive into this for them; here's to hoping they add this into Server as a standard feature.
June 2, 2014
Tableau Tip: Use the "refresh" URL parameter to avoid hitting the Server cache
I've been experimenting with Tableau for Mac quite a bit. This past week I've been focusing a lot on live connections to MySQL to replace some existing internal dashboards with more insightful ones. The great thing about our MySQL environment is that it's super fast and I can turn around a dashboard built on a template in less than an hour. While this has been awesome for proving the value of Tableau for Mac, I learned a lesson over the weekend about the Tableau Server cache.
We're at a luxury here at Facebook that we can have a separate environment for the 8.2 beta. In production, we all share a single server, so it's unlikely that you hit the cache. However, on the beta server, there are only a handful of us using the Server, which led to email over the weekend from my users that their dashboards with live connections are not showing the latest data. Why? Tableau is using the cache (as it should).
To solve this, all I have to do is force the dashboard to refresh every time the user hits the server. I accomplish this by adding the ":refresh" parameter to the URL. My URL now looks like:
https://[TableauServerURL]/views/[WorkbookName]/[ViewName]?:embed=y&:toolbar=no&:refresh
The refresh option on the end is what tells Tableau Server to re-render the view. Of course, you don't have to have the embed and toolbar parameters in the URL, but I like the way my view looks on Tableau Server when I include those options. For a full list of embed parameter, go to this link.
