Tableau Cloud Connected Apps Simple Implementation

A primer on connected apps in Tableau + basic implementation

Connected Apps allows a third party application to authenticate its users into Tableau Cloud via a JWT token. Developers consider it the most flexible and robust approach for embedded scenarios.

I’m going to walkthrough how to set it up. You can also see a video tutorial here.

Tableau Cloud and an external authorization server (if relevant) are left out of the diagram for simplicity, but those elements are also involved to confirm the token your application generates is valid.

Let’s breakdown the steps:

1. You configure a trusted relationship between Tableau Cloud and your app

• Go to Settings > Connected Apps > New Connected App > Direct Trust

• Limit what projects the authentication will apply to. And limit from what external domains can reach out to Tableau to authenticate users.

• Once created, see the relevant ID’s / keys we’ll need to reference in our code later.

2. Your application creates a JWT token based on relevant Tableau Cloud credentials (secret key, secret ID, client ID)

• Generate the token in your application’s server-side code like so:

Here is a screenshot of the Flask app code where we generate the JWT token. Note this token needs to be used within 10 min in this example.

3. Your application inserts JWT token into embedded Tableau html content

• Once the token is created, directly insert it into the HTML snippet that uses Tableau’s Embedding API like so:

4. Tableau Cloud begins a session for the relevant end user who now sees Tableau Cloud content embedded in the application

Here is a link to the Flask App on Replit so you can run it yourself.

Hope this walkthrough helps show the fundamentals of Connected Apps in Tableau.

If you need to filter the data in your Tableau viz using logic in your application, you can do that too: implementing row level security through user attribute functions