I’ve had a few visitors coming to the site searching for how to link Tableau to SSRS so I thought I’d write a quick post on how I’ve done it.
You need to make use of the URL action in Tableau, which you use in a dashboard. To be wanting to know how to link from Tableau to SSRS I am asuming a basic familiarity with Tableau dashboards. You will need a dashboard to make the link work.
To begin you need to create a dashboard and put whatever graphs, etc, you want on it. Next we need something on the dashboard from which to create our URL Action to take us to our SSRS report. Unfortunately there aren’t any controls such as buttons in Tableau so we need to create a new worksheet to act as our ‘button’.
In the worksheet we’re creating create a new calulated field that will act as our hyperlink. For the demo this field is just a text string saying ‘Click here to open SSRS’.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
In the new worksheet drag the newly created Hyperlink field into the Text area of the dashboard, which will give you a worksheet which only contains the text.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The next step is to add this new worksheet to your dashboard. Once in an appropriate position for the user on the dashboard then open your SSRS server to get the URL of the report you want to link to. Copy the SSRS URL into the clipboard.
Back to the dashboard, now create a URL action (Edit – Actions – Add Actions – URL). Choose ‘Select’ where it says ‘Run action on:’, which is the same as click, paste the SSRS URL into the URL space and make sure the worksheet selected is the new worksheet containing the Hyperlink field we just created. Only have this worksheet selected as this is the only worksheet you want to power the hyperlink.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
In the example above I have only created a demo dashboard containing nothing but the worksheet with the hyperlink (NewWorksheet) – in reality there would be more worksheets so make sure these are deselected.
Once you click OK the URL action is complete. When you click the text on your dashboard it will open up your SSRS report. If you want you could format the text to make it look like a hyperlink by underlining it and colouring it blue.
You can get even more sophisticated and pass parameters into your SSRS report so when you open it up it takes you to the same data as what you were filtered for in the Tableau dashboard. This isn’t incredibly complicated, you just need to create a calculated field which builds the URL including the parameters. I’ve written a post on passing paramters using the URL or the MS website contains a brief guide.
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