Tableau

The Tableau module gives site builders access to components of a Tableau server. These components are exposed as entities to Drupal, where you can render them in several different ways, as well as from within Views.

This module is specifically for licensed Tableau installations for which you have database access.

Installation

Tableau can be installed like any other Drupal module -- place it in the modules directory for your site and enable it on the admin/build/modules page.

To configure, you need to have the Tableau database configured in your settings.php file. This database (typically PostgreSQL) should have the key tableau. Refer to this how-to for more information on how to configure external databases on Drupal.

More configuration options are available by going to admin/config/tableau.

Usage

The Tableau module defines several Tableau components as Drupal entities. Specifically, it exposes elements from the following Tableau database tables:

• _users as tableau_owner
• _projects as tableau_project
• _sites as tableau_site
• _tags as tableau_tag
• _views as tableau_view
• _workbooks as tableau_workbook

The basic usage of this module is to use the Views module for querying and rendering Tableau components.

To load any of these entities programmatically, you can do something similar to $view = tableau_view_load($view_id);

This code will load the corresponding view, as well as any sub-components that are associated to it (based on fields like site_id, workbook_id, etc.).

Tableau views can be rendered by using theme('tableau_view', $options);, where $options is an associative array:

$options = array(
    'view' => $view, // Tableau view entity
    'width' => '320px', // Width in pixels or percentage
    'height' => '240px', // Height in pixels or percentage
    'tabs' => TRUE | FALSE, // Whether to show workbook tabs at the top
    'toolbar' => TRUE | FALSE, // Whether to show view toolbar at the bottom
    'format' => 'static' | 'interactive' | 'thumbnail',
);

Access control

Tableau provides basic access control through permissions for accessing Tableau content. It also provides access control based on Tableau Sites. By configuring the list of available sites, the module will verify that only components belonging to the enabled sites can be loaded.

Caching

This module provides two types of cache. The first one is for the actual Tableau entities, which will save on trips to the Tableau server database by storing loaded entities in the cache bin provided by Drupal.

The other one is for rendered static views (by using $format = 'static' in the theme() function, or selecting the "Static" format when rendering through Views), which will download the generated .png files and store them in the default files directory. The cached images expire whenever the corresponding workbook is updated.

Both caches are configurable from within the Tableau configuration page (admin/config/tableau).

Maintainers

This module was created by Victor Kareh and is sponsored by the Microfinance Information Exchange.

^{This module is not endorsed by Tableau Software. The Tableau Software logo, name and brand are the property of Tableau Software (tableausoftware.com). The logo file is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0}