It appears that choosing the "Daily at most" option for a Tableau email alert is literally checking for 24 hours to have passed, and not just that the day is a new day. I would like to set up a data-driven alert that emails my dashboard users when a particular dashboard has had it's data refreshed for the day. To do this, I set up a calculation to determine the days between Today() and the "As of Date" on the data. If it's new data that difference will be 1 (our fresh data will always be pulled as of the end of the previous day).
The problem is, I want this email to go out as soon as the data is refreshed, and that time varies depending on when the various data systems get through their nightly updates. For example, yesterday, the data wasn't refreshed until around 3:30pm, but today it was ready by 11:00am. I noticed this distinction between "calendar daily" and "24 hour daily" because I didn't receive an alert today after the refresh at 11am. It was waiting until 3:30pm.
How might I work around this? Anyone have a great idea for a tricky way to set up an alert, where I pick the email frequency to be "as frequently as possible", but make my dashboard calculation it is alerting on only go off once, the first time of day the data is refreshed?
Thanks!
That's true, but you could also bake that criteria into your calc. Assuming your data refreshes in the wee hours of the morning, time-box it so that the hour of NOW() is 2,3,4, or 5am. If that and the other condition applies, 1. Else, 0. That way you have a range of hours that no one would be likely to be changing fields or triggering a refresh attempt that wasn't the normally scheduled one. If you really wanted to be sure, you could blend in data from your Tableau Server repository database that checked whether the task had been initiated due to a manual refresh, or someone re-publishing, and ignore it in those cases. But honestly, at that point you're probably building in too much complexity for what you're after...so I'm typing that out mainly as a thought exercise for myself .
