Creating Tableau Extensions

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

At this point we have installed various applications, tools and packages. In the next section, we will be putting this to work and developing our first Tableau Extension.

No course can cover everything that you will require. The Web development space is huge, but we will talk about how you can maximize your learning on this course.

An important first step is to set up your development environment. In this section, we have a series of videos to help guide you to install the required software and various packages (this is my decided set of tools). If you would prefer, you can download and work through the written installation guide attached in the resources.

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.

Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. We will use Google Chrome to help debug and test our Tableau Extension.

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.

In this section, we are going to develop our first Tableau Extension, although, it will not do much for now, we will build our skeleton and make use of all the installed applications, tools and packages.

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.