Tableau Web Data Connector

[Conor Ryan]

Hey Guys!

Would it be possible to set up a Tableau Web Data Connector http://www.tableau.com/web-data-connector to tap into the 2016 data?  Tableau is a super powerful data visualization tool and FRC Supplier/Sponsor.

The Tableau Web Data Connector (WDC) is essentially the Extract API embedded directly into Tableau Desktop with javascript used as the wrapper to send data to it. This means that connector authors around the community can easily build Tableau connectors for any data source accessible via javascript but not currently listed in the native Tableau connections.

Tableau has been a kit sponsor for several years now, supplying 5 copies of their desktop software to teams however, team usage is low, largely because they don't have an easy way to pull in data consistently (outside of Excel dumps).  Tableau Public is free to use and designed to plug into any website, as long as there is a data connector to get to the data.  Links to dashboards can be publicly shared and embedded in pages.  From what I have read so far, I think the way the connector is designed would be ideal for usage in the field, at competitions.

I'd be happy to attempt to do some of the development myself in a branch, but I'd love to get pointed in the right direction.

Cheers,

Conor

More useful links: 

https://www.eric.pe/terson/engineers/a-tableau-web-data-connector-generator

http://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2015/07/27/5-things-to-know-about-the-tableau-9-1-web-data-connector/

ps - thanks for all the awesome work over the years

[Nathan Walters]

Hi Conor!

All of TBA's data is accessible via our API; the documentation for that can be found at https://www.thebluealliance.com/apidocs. By the looks of it, a Data Connector is really just some HTML and JavaScript that fetches data from a web service (like our API!) and returns it to Tableau in a format Tableau can read. If you know some basic JS, it shouldn't be too hard to walk through the data connector tutorials and make something that can hit TBA's API and spit out appropriately formatted data. Let us know if you need any help working with the API!

[Andrew Dickinson]

I know this is a bit of a late response, but during the season I ended up writing a WDC that hits the TBA API. I thought I would post it here for anyone interested. It's not the most elegant code, but I thought it might be useful. 

Google groups won't let me attach the zip I would like to, so here's a google drive link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_KcvpELW9SYTjBkb2U2eDZvQVE/view?usp=sharing