rmelikov / tableau_batch_scripts_self_service_bi

Tableau Server Self-Service BI Solution with Batch Scripts and pdftk

Tableau BI Self-Service Solution for Some Client

This solution was built so that some VPs could access Tableau reports from outside of the network. They wanted to be able to use the box.com app and have all of their scorecards, metrics, and reports in one folder in a form of PDF documents. This also allowed to save on Tableau licensing costs.

Here is how it works:

main.bat

It starts off with the main.bat file which makes calls to the rest of the files, settings.bat, vp01.bat, and vp02.bat. It asks for some parameters, like month, year, etc, then sets the settings for the project using the settings.bat file, and then completes jobs for each VP in their respective files. Additional VPs could be added later.

settings.bat

In the settings.bat file, the main thing is that it sets the location of the tabcmd.exe file into a tabcmd variable to make it so that you don't have to type out the path to tabcmd.exe each time.

Another main thing for this file is that it contains the username, password, and the server name to the Tableau server. This, of course, could be parametrized as well for security reasons.

And finally, the parameters from the main.bat file are passed into the settings.bat.

vp01.bat and vp02.bat

The main ideas here is that inside of this file we are making calls to the Tableau server one at a time to retrieve certain views as PDF documents. Some dashboards have many views but not all of them are needed by the VPs. So, we have to specify which views are needed to be extracted from Tableau server. These views are then put into new groupped PDFs, using a utility called pdftk. After the groups of PDFs are created, the single PDFs are deleted. Also, each call is numbered so that in case of an error during the call, an error message is logged into an error log. After each call there is an error check by looking at a Windows environment variable errorlevel. It it is not 0, then there is an error and the script logs a message into a log, identifying which call had a problem. After that, it resets the errorlevel variable. There is also some file organization happening in there.