Proposal: Security model about extensions-api HOT 4 CLOSED

• It would be helpful to selectively permit specific columns and/or tables to be visible to the user through such methods, instead of adopting an all or nothing approach. Elsewhere this is called perspectives.

• If you think of Tableau as a front-end to an organization's data (warehoused in any form), dashboards can help users locate specific data sets of interest. Ultimately they will have to go P2P to find the data they need.

• Setting up perspectives or letting a user browse to a perspective they need to request access to would be useful in organizations with strict access polices.

  • Having an on/off feature to allow access for specific users would be helfpul here, too.
  • Restricting the tunnel to the underlying data is a good idea. But, designing a carefully managed way to track down data sets of interest would be even more helpful to dashboard consumers.

• Let's say I need to build an extension for exporting subsets of data displayed in dashboard form.

  • I can let the user browse through what's available without seeing any data in raw format then download one-by-one.
  • I can use some other methods using powershell and a browser. https://www.r-bloggers.com/automatically-exporting-multiple-cross-tables-from-tableau-server-into-excel/
  • I can let the user download the packaged workbook then go about finding the data by learning how it was constructed. This takes time, expertise, and extra Desktop licenses.

• Let's say I want to get around Tableau's all or nothing approach for the View Underlying Data command, as discussed here https://community.tableau.com/ideas/1123

  • I carefully split up groups of columns in a main data source into separate secondary data sources. I lose functionality and add complexity by separating them, relating them back to customize View Underlying Data options. I even use filters to keep the raw data view pretty.
  • Any user that likes to see the pudding (raw data) will then have to see the full data landscape, relate raw data themselves, and really dig to feel confident in the dashboards & sheets' analyses.
  • I face design limits on methods I can't use when using primary and secondary data sources with different data types, aggregations, geospatial dual axis maps, etc.

I think of extensions as extending Tableau as a front end. I want to use Tableau to locate the source data, do some analysis, then use my extension to view or refine the data, see it again in Tableau, or display something using a fancy R integration perhaps. The middle layers are important to have column control and customization over.

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@datocrats-org If I'm understanding you correctly, you would want the owner of a datasource or admin to define which users have access to which columns in that datasource? Is that right? And you would want this to apply not just for the API but querying the datasource with Tableau in general?

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Closing out based on age. If this is still an issue, please reopen with a comment on the latest status and we can revisit.

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