🕐 3 min read

Tableau TACO Toolkit 2.0

October 2023

This release contains updated connector boilerplates.

This release also includes an update to the TACO Toolkit Web Data Connector SDK modules and documentation.

Tableau TACO Toolkit 1.3

November 2022

The Web Data Connector version 3.0 is a complete rewrite of the web data connector model used in previous versions. Web Data Connector 3.0 offers you extended flexibility and a streamlined toolset to create connectors for web-based data that isn’t easily retrieved using conventional ODBC or JDBC drivers. With the Web Data Connector 3.0 SDK, you can build connectors to virtually any web data source faster and more easily than ever before.

The Web Data Connector 3.0 framework revamps the web data connector developer experience by eliminating the hosting overhead of the earlier versions. This gives integrated authentication capabilities and modernizes the SDK tools, libraries, and API. These changes reduce the complexity for building a new web data connector.

Also, with the new framework, web data connectors appear as named connections in Tableau and can be distributed through Tableau Exchange. This makes the connectors more discoverable and usable across the Tableau platform.

TACO Toolkit

We created the TACO Toolkit to help you develop your connectors. The TACO Toolkit is an npm package. The toolkit contains a CLI, a software development kit (SDK), and the Extensible Protocol Server (EPS).

• The TACO CLI provides a global way to create and build a TACO project that contains your connector source code. The CLI can also pack a built TACO project into a Tableau TACO connector (the .taco file).

• The TACO SDK provides application programming interfaces (APIs) to help you develop your TACO projects (the source code). The SDK also provides some npm scripts, which allow you to build and test your projects with the standard npm commands.

• The EPS is started by the TACO CLI or the npm scripts to load and test your connector source code.connector.

Major features of connectors created with the TACO Toolkit

• Easier to find available connectors: Connectors are easier to find because they can be listed directly in the Tableau Exchange.
• Listed within products: Connectors you add appear as named connectors directly in Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and Tableau Server web authoring.
• Work across all products: Connectors work across all Tableau products including Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Prep, Tableau Catalog, and Tableau Cloud. Only Tableau managed connectors can be deployed to Tableau Cloud.
• Simpler development experience: We have made the development experience simpler and faster by doing the following.
  • Added direct support for modern authentication flows including OAuth 2.0 & OpenID. Because our SDK for WDC, ODBC, and JDBC are shared, we’re also sharing authentication support.
  • The SDK now bundles everything a developer needs to get started including a more robust simulator and test framework
  • The time required for you to create a connector is many times faster. You can theoretically be up and running with a boilerplate connector in under a minute compared to 20-30 minutes to have a basic connector running in the current WDC 2.x framework
  • No hosting required: You don’t need a web server to host the WDC connector or OAuth proxy, saving you management time and the cost of hosting.