Support TWBX as a content reference

[jdrummey]

There are Tableau deployments where there are a number of Tableau Reader users so having the ability for VizAlerts to distribute TWBX would be useful.

The challenge here is that the logic about what gets downloaded is inside Tableau. What I do know is that if a workbook has only live connections then a TWB is downloaded, if a workbook has only static connections (including extracts) then a TWBX is downloaded, I'm not sure of the both state. I suspect that might be a TWBX (that wouldn't be fully usable in Reader).

Given the amount of effort it would take to build a process that would check all the data sources and generate extracts (and particularly the security risks that might create) I suspect that it would be better to put the burden on the viz creator to make sure that the workbook will be downloaded as a TWBX, and the VizAlert scode would error if a TWB was downloaded.

[mcoles]

Perhaps the logic could go:

Requested: TWB, Found: TWB: Result: TWB attached / exported
Requested: TWBX, Found: TWB: Result: TWB attached / exported
Requested: TWB, Found: TWBX: Result: VizAlerts extracts TWB and attaches / exports
Requested: TWBX, Found: TWBX: Result: VizAlerts extracts TWBX and attaches / exports

I guess my concern about .twbx files is that they can be very large, easily large enough to push past the email attachment size limit that may exist on the mail server. We can add a config value for max email size to help manage this, I suppose. Exporting it shouldn't really be so much of an issue.

Do you see any value in supporting "TDSX" as a content reference, too?

[AirCooledNut]

Hmmm, I dunno. Seems to me this would be pushing what an alert is. I'd honestly be worried about any attachment, be it .CSV or .PDF. Some authors just don't get it (speaking from admin experience) and I can easily see someone emailing a .TWBX that uses a 5GB extract as it's data source.

Checking the size of the resultant file would be too late to determine if it met some threshold or not because by then the Tableau Server resources have already been wasted.

[jdrummey]

It seems like there are several issues here:

• Licensing. The Tableau Reader EULA as of Nov 2016 explicitly prohibits automated distribution from Tableau Server to Tableau Reader. For me some non-license-breaking use cases are for automated edits to .twb/.twbx (such as moving from dev to production) and for making backups of individual workbooks.
• Lack of specificity. We can request a twb and what we end up with depends on Tableau's internal logic (based on presence of an included data source or extract) that determines whether we get a .twb or .twbx.
• File size. As Toby & Matt pointed out we could end up with a giant .twbx.
• Permissions. We already know the need for permissions on file export, that is even more true for twb/twbx export.

It seems like we'd need to work on this in parts:

1. Get file export working to take care of perms.
2. Figure out some IFTTT like functionality for enabling transformation/migration-type actions such as moving from dev to production.
3. Figure out how to interrogate Tableau to get hints about the resulting type/size before attempting a download.

Jonathan