How Does Metric Insights Automatically Retrieve Filters and Filter Values from Tableau?
As of Release 6.2.5, Metric Insights can automatically pull Filters and Values for Elements, Datasets, and Dimensions from Tableau metadata files.
Users can choose to collect filters automatically and then switch to manual mode to add Filters of their choice; however, manually added Filters are not being saved when users switch back to auto collection.
Filter Names and Filter Values are refreshed within the Trigger run, if a given Plugin Profile is assigned to one.
Here's a brief explanation of how the functionality works behind the scenes. There are three basic scenarios of how the Plugin works based on whether Filter is defined in Tableau metadata:
- The Plugin gets both Filters and Values from the Workbook XML. NOTE: Range Filters and Filters without names are skipped since there is no support for such type in MI.
- If the Filter Values are not in the XML, the Plugin loads them from the CSV file that it gets for the Workbook. If the Filter is present as a column in the CSV file, the Plugin populates the Filter list from the distinct list of Values from this file.
- If the Filter is not present in both the CSV and XML, the Plugin cannot get Values.
So typically, the Plugin does not retrieve Filters because of the following reasons:
- Filters are not present in a Tableau metadata file.
- Filters are present in metadata, but there are no Values generated within a Tableau metadata file and there is no way to get them from the associated CSV file.