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The Tableau Bridge enables you to publish dashboards to Tableau Online while maintaining live connectivity with any data source. In this article, you will use the Tableau Bridge to maintain data freshness in a published workbook by listening for changes in the underlying Airtable data.
Airtable and Tableau integrations and automations Do everything in one place Customize your Airtable and Tableau integration with the following triggers and actions.
312 batteries life. The CData ODBC drivers offer unmatched performance for interacting with live Airtable data in Tableau Online due to optimized data processing built into the driver. When you issue complex SQL queries from Tableau Online to Airtable, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to Airtable and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations (often SQL functions and JOIN operations) client-side. With built-in dynamic metadata querying, you can visualize and analyze Airtable data using native Tableau data types.
Connect to Airtable as an ODBC Data Source
If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.
APIKey, BaseId and TableNames parameters are required to connect to Airtable. ViewNames is an optional parameter where views of the tables may be specified.
APIKey : API Key of your account. To obtain this value, after logging in go to Account. In API section click Generate API key.
BaseId : Id of your base. To obtain this value, it is in the same section as the APIKey. Click on Airtable API, or navigate to https://airtable.com/api and select a base. In the introduction section you can find 'The ID of this base is appxxN2ftedc0nEG7.'
TableNames : A comma separated list of table names for the selected base. These are the same names of tables as found in the UI.
ViewNames : A comma separated list of views in the format of (table.view) names. These are the same names of the views as found in the UI.
When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.
Add Airtable Data to a Dashboard
From a new workbook, click Data -> New Data Source -> Other Databases (ODBC). Select the CData Data Source Name (for example: CData Airtable Source).
In the Database menu, select CData.
In the Table box, enter a table name or click New Custom SQL to enter an SQL query. This article retrieves the SampleTable_1 table.
Drag the table onto the join area. At this point, you can include multiple tables, leveraging the built-in SQL engine to process complex data requests.
Click the tab for your worksheet. Columns are listed as Dimensions and Measures, which you can drag and drop onto the dashboard to create visualizations.
Set Up Tableau Bridge as a Service
In the Server menu, select Start Tableau Bridge Client.
Sign in to the Tableau Bridge using a site admin level account.
If prompted, select the Tableau Online site where you want to publish live data. The bridge client will open and is accessible from the system tray.
By default, the Tableau Bridge client is set to Application mode. Select 'Switch to service' to enable Tableau Bridge to handle live connections.
Log in to your Tableau Online site as an administrator.
From your site, click Settings, then Bridge.
In the Bridge settings, under Enable Clients to Maintain Live Connections, check the box labeled 'Enable Tableau Bridge clients to maintain live connections to on-premises data.'
Publish a Dashboard Containing the Live Data Source
Having configured both the Tableau Bridge and Tableau Online to enable live data connections, you can now publish your workbook to Tableau Online. From the Server menu, select Publish Workbook.
After choosing the workbook name and project that you wish to publish to, configure the deployment so that the CData ODBC driver for Airtable is embedded in your workbook as a separate, live data source.
Under Data Sources, select the option to Edit the embedded data sources in the workbook.
Change Publish Type to 'Published separately,' then select a desired means of authentication.
Last, select 'Maintain connection to a live data source' and click the green Publish Workbook button.
The published workbook now updates alongside the underlying Airtable data. From a published dashboard, simply click the Refresh button to reflect the most recent changes.
Have you heard of Airtable? We’ve been using it at Operation Fistula for several months now and are in love with it. Airtable is a collaborative online spreadsheet tool, that allows people who don’t normally work with data to create simple data bases that are easy to make, maintain and navigate. We now use it for various purposes such as:
Planning out apps before they are put into CommCare
Creating task lists
Tracking time on tasks
Submitting expenses
Keeping track of dashboard request
Mapping our filing system
These are just a few examples, and you will have to try it yourself to really understand the value that Airtable adds and how flexible of a tool it is. This post explains a little more what we do with our Airtable data.
Getting data out of Airtable
Collecting data is super easy in Airtable, and much of that information is happy to continue to live there as well. But at Operation Fistula we like to visualise our data in Tableau to make sure that we are getting the most use from it.
Manual downloads from Airtable are easy, but there is currently no way of connecting it directly to Tableau for a live connection. There are a few attempts at a Web Data Connector floating about, but none of these work at the moment and development of a WDC will be difficult until Airtable releases a metdata API.
Airtable does however have very extensive and clear API documentation, and I use Alteryx to extract data and then send it straight to our Tableau Online environment, so that the rest of the team can use the data they entered in Airtable to build visualisations that can help them with their work.
From Airtable to Alteryx
Using the macro
Airtable Tableau Tutorial
I created a macro, which you can find in the Alteryx gallery. The interface allows you to enter the API for the table you would like to access and your unique API key. You can find both of these in your Airtable API documentation.
The table reference is outlined in yellow in the image below. The API is outlined in orange. In order to view this, make sure to tick the box in the top right corner, which will reveal your key.
How it works
The outer shell macro serves the sole purpose of reading in those two bits of information, then sending them through the iterative macro that is nested inside of it.
Airtable Tableau Free
This iterative macro is needed because because Airtable only retrieves 20 records at a time, so an offset is required for pagination (Thanks to Peter, who taught me how to do this part). So the first part of the macro sends the right information through the download tool and assesses if another iteration is needed, and what information should be passed back for the next loop.
The second part of the iterative macro parses out the json into an orderly table. I have used this macro with a number of tables now and have so far not run into any issues, but it is possible that the setup of the workflow encounters problems with certain field types that we haven’t used in any of the tables that I am accessing. If you come across any issues please let me know. I will endeavour to keep the macro updated.
Tableau Vs Airtable
From Alteryx to Tableau
Uml call diagram. Once through the macro, I typically still have a few steps of processing that I do in Alteryx. Often times this is limited to selecting only those fields that I want to import, but if you have multi-select fields in your table these might need to be split out to be used in analysis.
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I then use the ‘Publish to Tableau Server‘ tool in order to set up a new data source on our Tableau Online environment. As we don’t have a way of scheduling Alteryx workflows at the moment I have all of my Airtables within one app, so that I only need to run the app to refresh all of my Airtable data on Tableau Online.