plumbertableau

plumbertableau lets you call external R code from Tableau workbooks via Tableau Analytics Extensions. You achieve this by writing a plumbertableau extension, which is a Plumber API with some extra annotations — comments prefixed with #*.

library(plumber)
library(plumbertableau)

#* @apiTitle String utilities
#* @apiDescription Simple functions for mutating strings

#* Capitalize incoming text
#* @tableauArg str_value:[character] Strings to be capitalized
#* @tableauReturn [character] A capitalized string(s)
#* @post /capitalize
function(str_value) {
  toupper(str_value)
}

# The Plumber router modifier tableau_extension is required
#* @plumber
tableau_extension

plumbertableau extensions are used in Tableau’s calculated fields. Let’s imagine we’ve published our extension to RStudio Connect and have given it the custom URL stringutils. To use our capitalize extension, we’d type the following into a Tableau calculated field, or just copy and paste it from the automatically generated code samples. (In real usage, you’ll probably replace "Hello World" with references to Tableau data.)

SCRIPT_STR("/stringutils/capitalize", "Hello World")

Before you use the extension in Tableau, Tableau needs to be able to access it. plumbertableau integrates seamlessly with RStudio Connect, a commercial publishing platform that enables R developers to easily publish a variety of R content types. Connect lets you host multiple extensions by ensuring that requests from Tableau are passed to the correct extension. It’s also possible to host plumbertableau extensions on your own servers.

Installation

You can install plumbertableau from CRAN or install the latest development version from GitHub.

# From CRAN
install.packages("plumbertableau")

# From GitHub
remotes::install_github("rstudio/plumbertableau")

library(plumbertableau)

Further Reading

You can read more about plumbertableau at https://rstudio.github.io/plumbertableau/. There, you’ll find more detail about writing plumbertableau extensions, publishing them to RStudio Connect, configuring Tableau, and using your extensions in Tableau.