Creating Tableau Extensions

If you prefer following written instructions to set up your environment, this is for you. If you prefer video tutorials the rest of this section will cover your environment setup.

This course does require a basic understanding of programming; if you are new to programming or need a refresher course, I would highly recommend spending time to go through the following tutorials

Now that we have downloaded the Tableau Extension API, we will go through the various folders, install the Tableau Extension API SDK Components, Build the TypeScript Samples, and test our extensions using a local server.

Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary. This will help keep our code looking nice and save the tedious work of formatting.

ESLint is a static code analysis tool for identifying problematic patterns found in JavaScript code. Rules in ESLint are configurable, and customized rules can be defined and loaded. ESLint covers both code quality and coding style issues. This will help reduce bugs as help ensure the quality of our code.

GitHub is a Git repository hosting service, but it adds many of its own features. While Git is a command-line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface. It also provides access control and several collaboration features, such as a wikis and basic task management tools for every project.

We will talk about the progressive nature of this course and introduce the various sections.

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript run time environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser. Node.js comes with the Node Package Manager (NPM) that helps us install the required software.

Microsoft VS Code is a code editor refined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud application. The best part, Microsoft VS Code is a free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with an abundance of extensions.

Gulp is an open-source JavaScript toolkit used as a streaming build system in front-end web development. We will leverage Gulp to automate our various build tasks such as Obfuscation, Minifying our files, SCSS to CSS compilation.