WDC Lifecycle and Phases

Important: Tableau Web Data Connector 2.0 (this version) is being deprecated at Tableau 2023.1 and eventually retired. We will still support WDC 2.0 until its last compatible version of Tableau (Tableau 2022.4) goes End of Life and is no longer supported.

For information about Tableau Web Data Connector 3.0, see the WDC 3.0 documentation.


This document explains the overall lifecycle of a Tableau Web Data Connector. It is recommended that you understand the material from the Get Started section before diving into this material.

A WDC is always run with an associated phase. Tableau loads the connector inside a web browser at different times and in distinct phases. This document will explain each of these phases and when each one runs.

Lifecycle diagram

At a high level, the WDC lifecycle is as follows:

Note: This is slightly simplified. For example, shutdown and shutdownCallback were left out, but both of these events take place at the end of each phase as well (they mirror init and initCallback).

Interactive phase: Interact with the user

Gather data phase: Fetch data from a web source

Authentication phase: Display authentication UI when needed

The authentication phase is an optional phase which Tableau uses to refresh extracts that require authentication. Rather than reload the connector and get the schema again, Tableau runs the authentication phase to only display the user interface required for authentication.

Note: This is not really a third phase, because it does not follow the other two; it’s an alternative to the first phase.

In this mode, the connector should display only the UI that is required in order to get an updated token. Updates to properties other than tableau.username and tableau.password will be ignored during this phase.

For more information, on how to use the authentication phase, see WDC Authentication.

Pass data between phases

Often it is necessary to pass data from one phase to another. For example, you might want to store user input from the interaction phase and use the input in the get data phase to build personalized requests to an API.

You can store data that you want to pass between phases using the tableau.connectionData property. The property can only store data as a string, so if you want to store JavaScript objects, you must serialize and deserialize the data.

For example, to store a JavaScript object as a string, you might run the following code:

tableau.connectionData = JSON.stringify(example_data);

Then, to convert the string back into a JavaScript object, you might run the following code:

JSON.parse(tableau.connectionData);

For an example of how you might use this in a web data connector, see the Multiple Tables Tutorial.