Deeper into the Tableau Repository Part 2: Opening it up with published datasources

This is Part 2 of a series where we dig into the Tableau repository.

There are lots of good bits of info in the Tableau Repository but Tableau only gives you one (two really but the readonly user is the one with good access) account with one password to access it. Site and Server Admins can see the built-in status dashboards to get information but there are a couple problems with them:

1. Only admins? come on Tableau it can't be that hard to add a row-level filter to your dashboards and let anyone see what they did or own.
2. Why can't I subscribe? They have embedded their own dashboards into Tableau Server they turned off the ability to subscribe. Wouldn't it be nice to get a subscription with how many extracts are failing on your server?

A few years back Matt Coles shared his sharable datasources at TC16 and I loved the idea. I don't like having to be a bottleneck or doing the same thing twice so these were a really great solution. I applied a user filter (more on that later) and then piloted the Background Tasks, Events, and a custom-built Comments DS with a small group of power-users. The beta was a great success and now they have been rolled out to all users.

Row-Level headache

First off who gets to see what? I kicked around some ideas and came up with that you should be able to see the row if:

• if you were the actor (you did the thing)
• if you own the object acted upon (Workbook, View, or Datasource)
• if you own a Datasource and the Workbook acted up connects to it
• if you own the project the Datasource or Workbook lives in
• if you are a project lead for the project the Datasource or Workbook lives in
• if you are a site admin or server admin

That list can be confusing, but I took it in chunks. Owners are easy, but it can be harder when there are multiple site/server admins and project leads. This was back before multi-table extracts and I wanted to be able to extract this datasource. To prevent exploding the extract I ended up combining all the Project Leads into one comma-separated field and doing a contains() in Tableau

select
    pr.id as project_id
    ,pr.site_id
    , ',' || string_agg(COALESCE(_users.name,gmemebers.name) , ',') || ',' AS username_PLead
from projects pr
left outer join next_gen_permissions ng on (pr.id = ng.authorizable_id AND ng.authorizable_type = 'Project' AND (ng.permission=1 or ng.permission=3))
inner join capabilities cap on (ng.capability_id = cap.id AND cap.name = 'project_leader')
left outer join _users on (ng.grantee_id = _users.id AND ng.grantee_type = 'User')
left outer join _groups on (ng.grantee_id = _groups.id AND ng.grantee_type = 'Group')
left outer join group_users on (_groups.id=group_users.group_id)
left outer join _users gmemebers on ( group_users.user_id = gmemebers.id)
Group by 1

I joined the above CustomSQL to the project_id once each for the DataSource, Workbook, and View. I did something similar for site and server admins. Then my row-level filter had a big boolean statement that looked something like:

USERNAME() = [item_owner_username]
OR USERNAME() = [actor_username]
OR CONTAINS([Current DataSource Project Leads],','+USERNAME()+',')
OR CONTAINS([Current View Project Leads],','+USERNAME()+',')
OR  CONTAINS([Current WB Project Leads],','+USERNAME()+',')
OR  CONTAINS([Admin Username],','+USERNAME()+',')

 I now do this with a live query, so there is no extract to explode. Sometimes I get off the wall requests that I have to manually create, but the published datasources make it only a handful each year.