Analytics Extension API – Tableau Sci-Fi: Advance Your Tableau With Data Science

TabPy v1.1.0 released

TabPy version 1.1.0 is released: package – https://pypi.org/project/tabpy/, release on GitHub – https://github.com/tableau/TabPy/releases/tag/1.1.0.

You can update your TabPy with the following command (you’ll need to stop all running TabPy instances first):

pip install --upgrade tabpy

New release main improvement is for /info method (https://tableau.github.io/TabPy/docs/server-rest.html#get-info) – now it checks for credentials to be provided if TabPy is configured for authentication. The improvement won’t affect any older Tableau Desktop or Tableau Server versions which already had support for TabPy authentication.

For how to configure authentication for TabPy read How to configure TabPy with authentication and use it in Tableau.

Extending Tableau with Ople.ai and new functions

In my previous post Haskell in Tableau? Yes, you can! I mentioned an example of Analytics Extention API implementation in the way it allowed to use Haskell in Tableau calculations.

And there are more examples of how Tableau calculations can be extended:

https://glitch.com/edit/#!/tableau-analytics-api-samples demonstrates how you can add new functions to Tableau (the example is in JavaScript), and
this video demonstrates how it is possible to use Ople.ai from Tableau:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hQVrh55in4.

Do you know of any other examples worth sharing?

TabPy v1 released!

It took some time, but TabPy v1 finally happened. Comparing to the previous v0.9.0 there are not so many changes:

TabPy is now Tableau Supported product! Used to be Community Supported.
External Services now branded as Analytics Extensions. Tableau Analytics Extensions API documentation is at https://tableau.github.io/analytics-extensions-api/.
The API itself was announced with Tableau blog post at https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2020/1/new-year-new-updates-analytics-extensions-api-hyper-api-javascript-api-and-rest.

To install TabPy or update your TabPy instance to the latest release run the following command:

pip install --upgrade tabpy

Additional reading:

Known Issues for the Tableau Analytics Extensions API – https://tableau.github.io/analytics-extensions-api/docs/ae_known_issues.html.

Haskell in Tableau? Yes, you can!

Some time ago I posted about alternative TabPy implementation (AltTabPy – lightweight and straightforward alternative to TabPy) you can use with Tableau. Using that alternative solution is possible because AltTabPy implements TabPy API and Tableau Desktop or Server simply calls that API. So Tableau is not hardcoded to use TabPy.

But if alternative implementations are possible is it also possible to implement the API for something completely different than executing Python script… like another programming language?

Yes – it is possible and people actually do it. Here’s an example of how you can use Haskell scripts in Tableau calculations – https://databoss.starschema.net/tableau-external-services-api-adding-haskell-calculations/. The post explains step by step how to implement TabPy API in Haskell and how to use the server with Tableau. Very well written post indeed and highly recommended for reading. The project itself is available on GitHub – https://github.com/tfoldi/tc19-haskell-ext/.

With those two examples (and there are few more you can find) it should be possible to implement TabPy API for any programming language (Lua, SQL, JavaScript, etc.) or even a service (imagine receiving weather data for given coordinates and date/time).

AltTabPy – lightweight and straightforward alternative to TabPy

Do you want to add some Python scripting to your Tableau visualization but struggle with How to Configure TabPy documentation? Take a look at AltTabPy – https://alttabpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html.

What TabPy is – Python script execution engine you can connect Tableau in the same way as you do for TabPy. Its installation and startup are extremely straightforward and simple, more details here – https://alttabpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started.html#installing.

What TabPy is not – it does not support models (deployed functions), authentication, SSL, logging and other configuration and backward compatibility with older TabPy versions. Read here for more details on how AtlTabPy is different – https://alttabpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/comparison.html.

AltTabPy is not supported by Tableau and is an independent project which (partially) implements TabPy API v1. The project itself is located on GitHub – https://github.com/innobi/AltTabPy.