Integrating Tableau in Business Objects

[Former Member]

Applies To:

SAP Business Objects XI R3.x

SAP Business Objects BI 4.0

Tableau Server

Summary:

There have been a lot of inqueries on how we can utilize Business Objects and Tableau together. Currenlty we cannot leverage universes to be used with Tableau but we can use existing Webi , Crystal Reports and Xcelsius Dashboards with tableau. This article discusses the use of Tableau Dashboard integrated into a webi report where we can simultaneously drill down in to both the Webi report and Tableau Dashboard. The solution will work only if the Tableau Dashboard is available on a server.

Data Source Used for Business Objects : e-fashion universe

Data Source Userf for Tableau : e-fashion access database

I have a Tableau Dashboard that is built against efashion showing a heatmap of Sales Revenue for each efashion store published to Tableau server.

 
The next thing i did was create a webi report against efashion universe to show the city and sales revenue for a year. The idea here is to drill on a city in the webi report to see a distribution of sales revenue by stores within that city. in order to integrate Tableau within business objects i am using two features hyperlinking and iframes. Below is a snapshot of how the report would look before we drill down on a city. I have loaded the Tableau dashboard to show in the iframe when the webi report is first opened. We can tweak the code so that Tableau dashboard only loads when we drill on a city.

   

Once we drill on a city the view would be as below

In order to accomplish the above i have created two variables one i named as Hyperlink which is used to show the city Values and pass them to the Tableau Dashboard in the table and the other is called iframe which is used to load the Tableau Dashboard in the iFrame.

Hyperlink - ="<a href=http://tablud01/t/Development/views/EfashionStoreRevenue/EfashionStorerevenue?:embed=y&:display_coun..."+[Year]+"&City="+[City]+"\" target=\"TableauView\">"+[City]+"</a>"

iFrame - ="<iframe id=\"TableauView\" name=\"TableauView\" height='413px' width='550px' frameborder='0' src='http://tablud01/t/Development/views/EfashionStoreRevenue/EfashionStorerevenue?:embed=y&:display_coun...'></iframe>"