Tableau Your Data!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13 Automating Tableau Server

As your Tableau Server deployment expands, the number of users and amount of data you have to manage will grow. Tableau provides three command-line tools and a set of APIs (Application Program Interfaces) that will help you automate routine tasks. Most of the functions these tools provide are available directly within Tableau Server’s user interface.

Using Windows Notepad (or your favorite text editor), you can automate tabcmd to run via a batch file. Then, by using Windows Task Scheduler, you can trigger the batch file to run at a specific time or based on a specific triggering event. Publishers can use similar techniques to automate extract refreshes without opening Tableau Desktop or leveraging Tableau Server by using the Data Extract Command-Line Utility. Of course, many popular scripting or programming tools can call Tableau’s command-line functions to automate tasks. How you use these tools is limited only by your desire and creativity.

If you are a system administrator and accustomed to writing script and using the Windows Command Processor and Windows Task Scheduler, you will not have difficulty incorporating any of Tableau’s command-line tools or APIs into your existing toolset. Many people don’t use these utilities because their full functionality is not clearly understood, or they have not seen specific use case examples. Tableau Software provides some good introductory videos on their website. You can find those by searching ...