The WDC API has been updated to provide the function tableau.enableCookiePersistence. This function provides WDCs the ability to share cookies across multiple WDC connections within a single Tableau Desktop session.

Once a WDC has made a call to the tableau.enableCookiePersistence function, any additional cookies created by WDCs in the current Tableau Desktop session will persist until the session ends.

Prior to this change, if a workbook had multiple WDC connections to the same host, each WDC connection would act as an isolated web session, with isolated cookies. This meant that for a workbook with 3 WDC connections all connecting to https://example.com with authentication, signing in would be required 3 times, as the cookie generated from logging in on one of the connections would not be available to the other connections.

Now, if a WDC triggers the tableau.enableCookiePersistence function, all cookies generated in WDCs will persist until the Tableau Desktop session ends. This allows WDC connections to avoid re-authenticating when all the WDC connections are authenticating on the same host.

As was the case prior to this change, cookies generated by WDCs are stored in memory, and are never saved to disk. Cookies will cease to exist once the Tableau Desktop process is closed.

Prior to Tableau 2019.4, Web Data Connectors used an internal browser in Tableau called Qt WebKit. In Tableau 2019.4 and later, Web Data Connectors use Qt WebEngine (a Chromium-based browser). The Qt WebEngine is a significant upgrade over the previous browser and provides better support for HTML5 and modern JavaScript tools.

Because of the change, users and developers of some WDCs might encounter issues. For more information, see Troubleshoot WDC WebEngine Issues in Tableau 2019.4 and later.

In addition, the debugging process for WDCs has changed. Developers will now be able to use the Chrome DevTools for debugging. For more information, see the Debugging a WDC in Tableau Desktop 2019.4 (and later).

If you are curious to see what new features are available with the new Chromium-based browser in Tableau 2019.4, you can open the Web Data Connector dialog box in Tableau, and point to the HTML5 test site (https://html5test.com). Note that this test site is not a WDC. The HTML5Test is a web site that reports the browser’s compatibility with the HTML5 standards.

In support of a future release of Tableau, we have released a new patch for the WDC API. The files can be found here:

https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.3.1.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.3.1.min.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.2.2.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.2.2.min.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.1.4.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.1.4.min.js

The only change in the patch is that instead of redeclaring window.tableau to point to webchannel objects, we are now explicitly copying over the needed tableau properties. This is required so that the original reference of window.tableau is not lost. Note this only affects customers who are using a version of Tableau with WDC WebEngine enabled (in a future release of Tableau).

Web Data Connectors (WDC) that use versions of the WDC client library (prior to v2.0.2) will display a warning in Tableau 2019.1.

Warning - This version of the Web Data Connector library is deprecated...

If you are using a Web Data Connector and see this warning message, contact the developer of the connector directly. In the future, a WDC that uses one of the specified libraries will not run, unless the developer updates the WDC to use a supported version of the library.

Versions of the WDC library that will not be supported

Starting in Tableau 2019.1, a WDC that uses one of the following versions of the Web Data Connector client library (tableauwdc-x.x.x.js) will display the warning message that the library has been deprecated and will not be supported in Tableau 2019.4:

• 1.x (all versions)
• 2.0.0
• 2.0.1

In Tableau 2019.4, any Web Data Connectors that uses one of the deprecated libraries will stop working.

Information for developers

If you are a developer of a Web Data Connector, refer to the migration guide for the steps to upgrade from version 1.x, see Upgrading from WDC Version 1.x. To find and use the latest version of the Web Data Connector client library, see WDC Versions.

The reason for this change

Web Data Connectors are JavaScript-based components written by third-party developers to build data connectors for Tableau. Web Data Connectors use an internal browser in Tableau called Qt WebKit. In Tableau 2019.4, Web Data Connectors will use Qt WebEngine (a Chromium-based browser), a significant upgrade over Tableau’s current browser. WDC developers will benefit from this upgrade with the ability to use modern JavaScript, and Chrome developer tools for debugging WDC code.

The earlier versions of the Web Data Connector client library were not designed for use under Qt WebEngine. Therefore, Tableau will no longer support these versions in future releases.

With the release of Tableau 10.4, you can now connect directly to spatial data. Using the new geometry value in the tableau.dataType enum, you can send GeoJSON objects directly back to Tableau.

This feature supports the following geoJson types:

• Points and MultiPoints
• Lines and MultiLines
• Polygons and MultiPolygons

Learn more about how to upgrade to Tableau 10.4 and about the new features available here: Get Tableau 10.4.

Learn more about GeoJSON here: GeoJSON documentation.

You can use the following hosted API scripts to take advantage of this new feature:

https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.3.latest.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.3.latest.min.js

With the release of Tableau 10.2 comes a new feature for multi-table connectors. You can now use join filtering to filter the data from one table based on the data from another table. This minimizes requests to your data source for improved data access speeds and reduced server loads. For more information, see Join Filtering in the documentation.

Learn more about how to upgrade to Tableau 10.2 and about the new features available here: Get Tableau 10.2.

The latest version of the WDC is here and it comes with a host of new features:

Standard connections

Have you ever wanted to predefine joins in Tableau? Now you can! When you create a web data connector that gets data from multiple tables, you can pre-specify how you want to join the tables in Tableau Desktop. The standard connections feature supports left and inner joins for tables. See the image above for a preview of standard connections in the simulator.

For more information on how to create standard connections, read the documentation or view the sample connector on Github.

Progress reporting

We’ve seen Tableau users create some incredibly sophisticated connectors for Tableau–but the more complex the connector and the more data you download, the more likely are to have to wait while Tableau downloads data from your connector. Now, you can do yourself (and your users!) a favor by adding progress reporting to your connectors. Send a progress message from your connector to Tableau Desktop with the tableau.reportProgress function. For more information, see the API reference.

Upgrade to Tableau 10.1

Learn more about how to upgrade to Tableau 10.1 and about the new features available here: Get Tableau 10.1.

2.0.9 Patch Notes

To go along with the release of Tableau version 10.0.1, we have also released a new patch of the WDC API. This can be found here:

https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.0.9.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.0.9.min.js

The only change in this patch is:

• Bug Fix: Added missing platform properties to the WDC library so that they can be used in the Simulator.

There are four platform properties available through the API:

• platformOS
• platformVersion
• platformEdition
• platformBuildNumber

These properties were available since the release of Tableau 10, but were not working in the Simulator until now.

On a related note, we fixed a bug in Tableau Desktop 10.0.1 that caused the tableau.platformVersion to incorrectly show as “0.0.0”. Now, the version is correctly displayed as “10.0.1”.

Upgrade to Tableau 10.0

You can now use connectors made with version 2.0 of the WDC API in Tableau! Learn more about how to upgrade to Tableau 10.0 and about the new features available here: Get Tableau 10.

GitHub Changes

Version 2.0 of the WDC API is now the latest released version of the WDC API. Because of this, the dev branch of the WDC GitHub repository has been merged into master, and master now represents version 2.0. You can still access earlier versions of the WDC SDK through our release tags on GitHub.

There are a few ramifications of this:

• The hosted v1 samples are now deprecated (though we will continue to host them for some time to avoid any inconvenience).
• The hosted v1 simulator has been removed from our github.io page.
• Development for version 2.1 of the WDC SDK is now underway in the dev branch.

To be clear, we still support the v1 samples and simulator. These will continue to be usable (and found through our GitHub release tags). These samples and simulator are still helpful when developing v1 WDCs - for Tableau 9.3 and earlier. WDC v1 documentation can be found here. But we are no longer hosting these, to keep our GitHub branches in sync with the current version of the API.

2.0.8 Patch Notes

We have also released a new patch of the WDC API. This can be found here:

https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.0.8.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.0.8.min.js

Here is a list of changes since the last released patch (2.0.5):

• Bug Fix: authPurpose attribute was missing from the shim, resulting in this attribute not being accessible in the simulator.
• Bug Fix: fixed two instances where context was not properly set.
• Bug Fix: missing underscore typo fix.

Get the latest version

You can get the latest version of the WDC here:

https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.0.latest.js

There is also a minified version available:

https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.0.latest.min.js

The above URLs are the recommended ways of linking to the Tableau WDC and guarantee that you receive patch versions for the current minor version as we release them. If you prefer to opt out of receiving automatic patch versions, you can link directly to the current patch version, 2.0.5:

https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.0.5.js
https://connectors.tableau.com/libs/tableauwdc-2.0.5.min.js

Update beta connectors

If you were one of our wonderful beta adopters, the tableauwdc-2.0.0-beta.js release will remain available to give you time to update your beta connectors. However, the beta version is now officially deprecated. Note that the latest release includes several critical bug fixes and adds locale support.

New feature: Locale support

The latest version of the WDC also includes a new locale API that was not part of the beta. You can use the locale API to get the language currently set by the user in Tableau Desktop from the Help > Choose Language menu. This language is accessed through the tableau.locale property and can be used to conditionally display translated text in your connector.

To see the locale API in action, see the new eathquakeMultilingual sample in the Examples directory of the webdataconnector repository.

These features are in beta and may change.

So, why the change?

When the initial version of the WDC API was released with 9.1, it allowed you to connect Tableau to all kinds of web data sources. Since then, the response to the WDC has been phenomenal! We’ve seen hundreds of web data connectors built. But, as usual, there were some crucial limitations in the design of version 1.0 (wait, I can only bring back a single table?).

We’ve learned a lot since then, and we’ve received a large amount of helpful feedback from the developer community. In response to that feedback, and in an effort to continue to empower you to connect to the data you care about, we are excited to release version 2.0 of the web data connector API.

Important: This is a breaking change. Existing connectors will continue to work in future versions of Tableau. However, if you link an existing connector to version 2.0 of the WDC API, then you will have to update the connector to use the new API.

What’s new?

Version 2.0 includes two fundamental changes:

• You can include multiple tables of data.
• You can signal that you are done gathering data with a single callback, and you can add data that you gather directly to a table object created by Tableau. Previously, there was no way to signal that you were done gathering data. As a result, the WDC API repeatedly ran your getTableData function so that you could pass data to Tableau through a callback parameter.

Differences between version 1 and version 2

In version 1:

1. A connector loads and runs its interactive phase, then calls tableau.submit().
2. In the data gathering phase, Tableau calls connector.getColumnHeaders(), which defines the schema for a single table. The getColumnHeaders() function finishes by calling a predefined callback.
3. Tableau calls connector.getTableData(), which passes data to Tableau by means of a parameter on the predefined tableau.dataCallback() function.
4. Step 3 is repeated until tableau.dataCallback() passes a flag to Tableau to signal that there is no more data.

In version 2:

1. A connector loads and runs its interactive phase, then calls tableau.submit().
2. In the data gathering phase, Tableau calls connector.getSchema(), which defines the schema for one or more tables. The connector calls a predefined callback to signal that it is done defining the table schema.
3. Tableau calls connector.getData() with a table object parameter and a callback parameter. The getData() function appends data to the table object using the object’s built-in table.appendRows() function. The getData() function is called once for each table defined in the schema.
4. When the getData() function is done gathering data, it calls the doneCallback() that it was passed as a parameter.

Preview of additional changes

Keep an eye on this page—we have a LOT of other features in the works. Here’s a preview of some of the things we’re working on:

• New Metadata APIs - Tell Tableau if your column is a dimension, a measure, discrete, continuous, a State, a Zip Code, an oddly formatted currency, and more!
• Clearer Authentication - Tell Tableau what your auth type is and when your connector has authentication needs.
• Whitelisting functionality on Tableau Server - you are no longer forced to use tabadmin import_webdataconnector.
• All new samples.
• A new community portal to browse community built connectors.