The WDC Is Now Open-Source and Taking Contributions

Since we released the Web Data Connector as part of Tableau 9.1, we’ve been thrilled to see the enthusiastic community reaction to this platform. We will continue to invest in the WDC platform to help our community connect Tableau to the data they care about most. But we also want to give you a chance to contribute to the platform.

Since we released the Web Data Connector as part of Tableau 9.1, we’ve been thrilled to see the enthusiastic community reaction to this platform. We will continue to invest in the WDC platform to help our community connect Tableau to the data they care about most. But we also want to give you a chance to contribute to the platform.

So we decided to migrate the Web Data Connector SDK to GitHub and start treating it as an open-source project. The move includes the API, the official WDC samples, and the WDC simulator.

This will make it incredibly easy for developers to contribute and improve on the WDC Platform. We now have a contribution license agreement in place. That means this project can take community contributions in the form of pull requests. For details on contributor licenses, please check out the front page of our organization on GitHub. Our developers will also be using GitHub for any development on the simulator or samples.

Check Out Our New WDC Simulator

And I have more good news. I’m excited to tell you about a project we cooked up at an internal hackathon, a brand new WDC simulator! We’ve heard your feedback: The simulator can be difficult to use and doesn’t always accurately reflect how the WDC will behave in Tableau. So we built a new one.

This new simulator is a React app and more closely mirrors the Tableau environment. The new simulator comes with some great new features like the ability to debug the two main phases of the Web Data Connector independently. It also includes support for OAuth flows. For more details, check it out here!

As you probably noticed, we haven’t brought the new simulator into the main code branch yet; it’s just a pull request at this point. We did this because we wanted to give you a chance to check it out and share your feedback. We wanted to take a more collaborative approach to updating WDC features and samples. If you have an idea for improvements, you don’t have to submit a feature request and wait for one of our developers to work on it. Just go ahead and submit a pull request.

We’ll also closely watch issues submitted to GitHub so that we can have a better understanding of the roadblocks you are facing in your WDC development. We’ll get a test suite up on GitHub soon, but for now, the pull request-approval process will be fairly lightweight and ad hoc.

This is just the beginning for WDC. You’ve already blown us away by what you’ve done with the platform. I’m looking forward to working with the developer community as this platform continues to evolve and grow.