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Publish to Tableau Cloud / Server

When you are ready to make your Hyper file available to other users, you can publish it to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud. There are multiple options, depending on whether your file contains a single table or more than one table.

  • Option 1: Use Tableau Desktop to publish the file as part of either a workbook (a .twbx file with an embedded data source) or a separate packaged data source (a .tdsx file). For details, see Publish a Data Source.

  • Option 2: Use either tabcmd, the Tableau REST API, or the Tableau Server Client library for Python to programmatically publish the .hyper file as is, without packaging it into a data source. Starting with Tableau Server 2021.4, the data model for the data source is generated from the foreign keys in the .hyper file. In particular, a relationship between two tables is generated whenever they are connected with a foreign key. Tableau Server versions 2021.3 and earlier do not support this and thus have the restriction that the file must contain exactly one schema with one table. Additionally, Tableau Server versions 2019.4 and older require both the schema and the table to be named “Extract”; in other words, the qualified name of the single table must be "Extract"."Extract" (note the double quotes, since the capitalization matters). This restriction has been removed in Tableau Server 2020.1. See Publishing a single-table Hyper file directly to Tableau Cloud/Server and Publishing a multi-table Hyper file to Tableau Cloud/Server for examples with the Hyper API and the Tableau Server Client library.

  • Option 3: Manually assemble your own packaged data source by packaging the Hyper file and a corresponding data source (.tds) into a single zipped file and changing the file extension from .zip to .tdsx. The .tds file is essentially an XML file that describes the properties (connections, joins, et cetera) of the Hyper extract. Note, however, that Tableau provides no support for this method and no programmatic way to create these files. That said, it is fairly easy to modify an existing saved data source for your purposes. For example, you could use Tableau Desktop to save the .hyper file; then, from the Data menu, select the extract, choose Add to Saved Data Sources, and edit the saved .tds file as appropriate. For an (unsupported) example that programmatically swaps out the file in an existing packaged data source, see Publishing a Multi-Table Hyper File to Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server.

As noted, Options 1 and 3 will also work if your Hyper file contains more than one table, but Option 2 will not.