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.
You can view open issues, and submit new issues, on our Github issues page.
If you are creating a new connector for Tableau 10.0 or later, you should use version 2 of the WDC API. However, version 1.0 of the WDC API will continue to work in Tableau 10.0. Additionally, Tableau 9.3 and earlier only support version 1.0 of the WDC API.
For information about version 1.0 of the WDC, see the archived documentation and simulator.
Tableau does not provide support for connectors or for other programs written to interface with the WDC API. However, you can submit questions and ask for help on the Tableau developer community forums.
Tableau does provide support for the WDC library and SDK though. If you find an issue with the WDC library, the simulator, or any of the developer samples, submit an issue on Github.
The WDC API runs connectors in multiple phases, and each phase runs in a separate instances of a web browser. To pass
data between phases, use the tableau.connectionData variable created by the API for this purpose. For more
information, see the documentation for the phases of the web data connector.
To run extract refreshes for connectors, you need to configure Tableau Server and import the connector. Contact your server administrator and see the Tableau Server documentation on web data connectors.
Because running custom code for a connector represents a security risk, there is currently no way to refresh extracts for connectors published to Tableau Online. As an alternative, you can use the Tableau Online Sync Client to schedule extract refreshes on a desktop computer.
This was an issue in a previous version of the WDC. To fix the issue, get the latest version of the WDC from the WDC Versions page.
Tableau Desktop embeds the Qt Webkit browser into the product to display your connector pages. This browser might lack some of the features of modern browsers, including specific HTML5 and other features. For more information on browser support, see the features in Qt 5.4, which is the version used by Tableau. You may also want to see the Qt Webkit page on HTML5 support.
By default, the Tableau Desktop log files are stored in the following location:
Users/<username>/Documents/My Tableau Repository
The log.txt file contains information for the interactive phase of your connector. The tabprotosrv.txt file contains
logs for the data gathering phase. The Tableau Log Viewer is an open source tool that makes it easier to read Tableau logs: https://github.com/tableau/tableau-log-viewer.
The methods in your connector code are run by the WDC API. Ensure that you are running the connector in the simulator or
Tableau. You might also want to ensure that the tableau.submit function is being called either by user input or by a
page load event.
Why yes, yes you can! Just add the
target="_blank" property to the anchor element in your web page and it will open in the user’s default browser instead
of opening in Tableau. For example, you might enter the following link:
html <a href="http://tabsoft.co/wdc" target="_blank">Hello Docs!</a>
We will happily take contributions to anything in the WDC SDK aside from the core library (i.e. tableauwdc-version.js). This includes the simulator, documentation, and samples. We cannot take contributions to the library file because that file represents a bridge between a WDC and proprietary Tableau platform code. For more info on open source at Tableau, visit http://tableau.github.io/.