Hello community,
When publishing data source from Prep Builder to Tableau Online, can I specify some number fields as Dimensions rather than Measures that will be default for number fields, or any measures to change the setting after publishing data?
Concretely, there are fields like "Customer Id" or "Order Id" that want to be recognized as a dimension when connecting to published data source from Tableau Desktop.
Currently I change these fields to Dimension when opening a new worksheet every time so I'm wondering there are any work arounds or tips.
The alternative option will be that I change the format of these fields from number to string so that they are naturally recognized as dimensions, but I wonder if I could keep the format as it is.
Thank you.
Hi,
At this time we can't do that kind of specification in Tableau Prep, here are two feature requests for that: https://community.tableau.com/s/idea/0874T000000HBLUQA4/detail and https://community.tableau.com/s/idea/0874T000000HBr4QAG/detail
That said, current process for updating the metadata is to:
1) Publish your data source from Prep (potentially filtered to a smaller row count for performance).
2) Connect to the data source in Tableau Desktop.
3) Create a local copy of the data source.
4) In the local copy make the desired the metadata changes for dimension & measure, aliases, default field formatting, etc.
5) Publish the local copy back to the same location as in step 1.
6) Remove any filters you'd applied in step 1 and re-run your Prep flow with new data. Prep will update the data (the Hyper extract) while preserving the metadata changes you made in step 4.
Jonathan
