Technology Preview
Note: This format is still under active development, so please expect changes to the current behavior. Safe Software does not recommend using this format in production environments.
Overview
Tableau is a business analytics and data visualization tool with optional online components for displaying visualizations in web pages.
FME provides write access to Tableau Hyper (.hyper) files. Hyper files contain one or more schema, which in turn contain one or more tables. Feature types will be written as tables within a given Hyper schema. Each writer can provide a default schema, and individual feature types may override if needed.
A Tableau Hyper file supports standard, non-spatial data types, as well as certain spatial geometry types. It can be used with Tableau products including Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server. Tableau Hyper files supersede the older .tde files with improvements in performance and storage.
Each attribute in FME is mapped to a column in a Hyper file; during the writing process, spatial information is placed in an additional column with a given name. Each feature type in FME is written to a separate table.
More information about Tableau and Hyper files can be found at www.tableau.com.
Versions
This writer supports the creation of Tableau 10.5 .hyper files.
About the Writer (Hyper)
The Hyper writer writes features as rows into a single table in a hyper file.
The writer can create a single file and multiple tables with an arbitrary number of rows and columns. The feature type name will be the name of the table created. A table name may be prefixed with a schema name followed by a period (.).
All tables must be within a schema and tables without a schema prefix will use the Default Schema parameter of the writer.
Format Usage Notes
- Tableau Hyper does not support some geometry types. If you attempt to render any non-supported geometries (by dragging them into a mark in the sheets view), Tableau will open an error window indicating that they are not yet supported.
- Currently Tableau supports points, lines, polygons, ellipses (as polygons), and donuts (as polygons). Certain aggregate types such as multipolygons are also supported.
Writer Overview
The Hyper writer uses the Tableau Hyper API to create Hyper extract files and add, modify, or remove data from them. The Hyper writer provides the following capabilities:
- Schema Creation
- Table Creation
- Geometry Insertion
- Geometry Update (based on other attribute value matching)
If a schema does not yet exist in the Hyper file, it will be created automatically. Tables will be created with the schema defined by the writer feature type, subject to the Table Handling Feature Type parameter. Other attributes will be ignored.
Tips for Using the Hyper Writer
When inserting a feature into Hyper, missing and null attributes on the feature will be written as null values. Empty string attributes on the feature will be written out as empty strings.
Troubleshooting
Before trying to write to the Hyper file, ensure that the file is not opened by another program, including another instance of FME.
Multiple writers writing to the same Hyper file is not supported. Each writer must have a unique destination dataset.