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xHeliotrope / redcap-wdc

REDCap Web Data Connector for Tableau
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Getting data to auto-refresh in Tableau? #5

Open jonbarco opened 6 years ago

jonbarco commented 6 years ago

I was able to export all of the data from RedCap into Tableau using the code. I'm fairly new to this - is there a way I can get new data that goes into RedCap to refresh in Tableau? I noticed that when I shut my computer off or close out Git Bash there is no longer a connection. We have data that goes into RedCap daily so if there is an easy or quick way to get it to export to Tableau it would be very beneficial. Thanks!

xHeliotrope commented 6 years ago

If you're shutting your computer down frequently, I'm not sure if theres a simple way to keep the server up all the time. The best solution would be to have a dedicated computer in your network that could keep the app running. There are cloud services that would be helpful here (AWS ec2 or maybe lambda), but I'm not sure you'd want your REDCap data in the cloud, as that would dramatically lower the security of a data store like REDCap.

Maybe you could schedule a task on your Windows machine, that runs the server on startup? https://eddyerburgh.me/run-a-node-script-with-windows-task-scheduler

jonbarco commented 6 years ago

Thanks for the info, this is helpful... One last question - if I shut the computer down and reconnect REDCap to Tableau will it pull the new data into the existing Tableau dashboards I create or will I have to manually update the Tableau dashboards?

Thanks again I really appreciate it!