VizQL Data Service Introduction

🕐 2 min read

The VizQL Data Service provides a programmatic way for you to access your published data outside of a Tableau visualization. With a viz, you perform operations like dragging a pill to rows or columns. This accomplishes two things. It fetches data from the data source, and then creates a visualization of that data.

With VizQL Data Service, you can fetch the data without any need for a visualization.

How does it work?

VizQL Data Service is a standard HTTP service with a Query data source method and a Request data source metadata method. In both methods, you describe your data request in the request body as a JSON object.

Endpoints

The endpoint for the Query data source method is:

POST https://{your-pod-site}/api/v1/vizql-data-service/query-datasource

The endpoint for the Request data source metadata method is:

POST https://{your-pod-site}/api/v1/vizql-data-service/read-metadata

Note: Your pod site is in the first portion of the domain of your site URL after signing in to Tableau Cloud. For example, if your sign-in URL is https://10az.online.tableau.com, your pod is 10az.

Required tools

There are many ways to make API requests. You can create your own or use existing tools like cURL and Postman. See the VizQL Data Service Collection in the Tableau APIs Postman collection to help get you started.