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Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

Definitive answers from Designer Desktop experts.

Error when publishing a large data set to Tableau Server

kchen
Alteryx
Alteryx
Created

Errors when publishing a large data set to Tableau Server


Environment Details

 

When a workflow tries to publish a large .hyper or .tde file to Tableau Server, even though the credentials are all correct, the following errors may occur:

Tableau Server API Request (Upload file) Error Code 401002: Unauthorized Access -- Invalid authentication credentials were provided
Tableau Server API Request (Publish file) Error Code 401002: Unauthorized Access -- Invalid authentication credentials were provided
Error transferring data: Timeout was reached
  • Alteryx Designer
  • Publish to Tableau Server tool, Tableau Output tool
  • A small data set can be published Tableau Server with same credential with no error
  • The workflow, specifically the part that publishes the data to Tableau Server, executes for a long time

 

Cause

 

The Tableau Server credentials token that authorizes the process of publishing to Tableau Server has expired. By default, the authentication token is good for 240 minutes (4 hours). This value may be changed in your environment, please check with your Tableau Server administrator.

 

Resolution

 
  1. Increase Tableau Server’s session timeout limit by using the tsm configuration set command and setting the "wgserver.session.idle_limit" or "wgserver.session.lifetime_limit" option. For more information on how to do this, see this Tableau KB article .



Additional Resources

Comments
jrpaul
7 - Meteor

Can you or someone from Alteryx provide info on WHEN the Publish to Tableau tool initiates the authentication?  The error you describe sounds like what I'm experiencing, but here's what I have noticed.

 

I have the main workflow (the query and join part) , then a block-until-done at the end, followed by the publish to Tableau tool.   The main part takes 4+ hours.   When I run this workflow, I eventually get the authentication error.  

 

If I output an Alteryx database file instead, then create a second workflow that uses this YXDB  file as input into Publish to Tableau, the second workflow completes successfully within 2 hours.  

 

For the first workflow that fails, when I click "Run', I noticed that the Publish to Tableau tool displays 3% completion immediately.  My question is whether it is performing the connection to Tableau server right away, rather than wait until the workflow gets to that tool?    Seems like it might be, as I'm not sure how else it would time-out as the final step doesn't take 4 hours after reaching the block-until-done.

 

For now, my workaround is to save to a file first, but would be nice to understand more about the connection timing as something doesn't look right compared to my second work flow.  

nlian
6 - Meteoroid

Dear Alteryx,

 

I also support this idea.

 

Current "Publish To Tableau Server" workflow should be improved to authenticate or re-authenticate just before publishing to Tableau.

It is because in some large or complex extract, it may take hours for .hyper to be generated, resulting timeout when the tool is ready to publish to Tableau.

This has been an ongoing issue. 

 

Thanks,

 

Lian

JayZi
6 - Meteoroid

Hi, I strongly support JrPaul request

I am experiencing very same which tend to be so annoying, because my inputs are sometimes large and sometimes small in size(for the same workflow).

 

My observation is, once any bite of data reaches "Publish to Tableau Server" tool then the upload is initiated immediately but my previous step (data transformation) is not finalised yet, so sometimes it takes a lot of time to transform data itself, so there is no "time period" /cache available to finalize the upload to tableau server.

I tried to stop the current of data by putting tool "Block Until Done" [cat: developer] one step before "Publish to Tableau Server" tool, but it does not stop data flow/current as I assumed.

 

regards.

 

lepome
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

@JayZi 

The Block Until Done tool prevents the data from flowing through anchor 2 until after all the data have passed through anchor 1.  (It does not prevent data through anchor 2 until all tools downstream from anchor 1 have completed, just until they've passed.)  This seems to be a common misconception about the function of the Block Until Done tool.  Flow control can be achieved in several other ways, the most versatile being a batch macro.

MortenAndreasen
5 - Atom

We are having the same problem. I managed to upload a file using this guide in Python, so it is not a Tableau problem for sure. Hope this issue can be resolved soon.