A Simple Guide To Set Up Tableau Row Level Security

By Laurent Mauer · October 19, 2022 · 7 min read

It is not always secure to expose all information to its users.

At a particular stage, we need to share information among some selected parts of the organization members.

That’s why the need to restrict the information accessed in Tableau workbooks came into the picture.

Tableau Row Level Security is the best solution for solving this particular issue.

How it helps to restrict data accessibility by the users from Tableau workbooks and more about Tableau Row Level Security is well discussed in this article.

Summary

What is Tableau Software & Its Prerequisites?

Following are the prerequisites before you start with Tableau Row Level Security.

Already exposed to the basic understanding of Tableau and its servers.

Tableau is one of the widely used Business Intelligence and Data Visualization tools in the organization or at the individual level.

This tool helps visualize collected data so that everyone can easily interpret it.

With Tableau, you can create multiple kinds of visualization with its help and aggregate them to display in a dashboard.

Tableau has some crucial features, as mentioned below:

Tableau users can create interactive dashboards with their data through their excellent visualization techniques.
It gives the extensive feature of sharing the dashboard over the cloud, thus can be available from anywhere the user wants.
In Tableau, users get 200+ connectors that can be actively connected to data sources.
It’s simple to do collaborative work with the team with the help of Tableau.
Different data sources can be connected along with importing data from external sources offered by Tableau.

What is Tableau Row Level Security?

Tableau Row Level Security functions as limiting data to be shared among users that is available in Tableau workbooks.

Tableau gives you an option to grant permission you can view or edit the content by accessing it.

Data can be accessed and edited from a different location. For example, two users, one from Africa and the other from America, can edit the same data simultaneously.

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Before you apply Tableau Row Level Security, Tableau users can access the workbook to see all kinds of data without any restrictions.

But with its Row Level Security, you get the option to specify which can be viewed by which users signed into the Server.

Tableau Row-Level Security: How-to

There are different ways to implement row-level security. Now we will discuss it one by one.

1. User Filter Manual Mapping

Suppose we have a data table showing the total grades aggregated by each student in the class:

Now what you want is for only a particular student to access their grade without another’s grades visible to him.

For this, you can create a filter and map by which each student can view their grades.

Following are the steps to make such a filter:

Firstly, press on the Menu Bar and choose Server.
Now select the “Create User Filter” option. After this, a list of lots of fields will get an option for you. If previously you might not have signed into Tableau Online or Server account, then you would be asked to make it complete.
The Last step is assigning users to their access part.

This option is best if you have fewer numbers of users with you because if there are more numbers of users, then mapping would become a tedious job.

2. Dynamic Filter with a Security Field

This method of Tableau Row Level Security involves a step of joining the data source as well as the security table.

The security table there listed all its users with their usernames and real names by which they are accessing.

Between the data and the user’s table, a join is developed. Moreover, a dynamic filter is also added with a calculated field.

The following formula can be used:

USERNAME()={User}

The USERNAME() here refers to the user’s name trying to sign into Tableau. After this, you must activate the security filter and only allow TRUE results.

This is the best approach when users and groups are added without manual mapping.

By the way, it offers a terrible performance compared to the user filter method. It is because there is a need to join the security table with the available data.

3. Security Groups

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This is also a method for the implementation of Tableau Row Level Security. In Tableau, you get the option to create groups with the feature of adding users to them.

You can form a group from the Group tab option available in Tableau Server.

Now click on the user’s tab option and add users to this group.

After you are done with creating a group and adding users to it, you now create a user filter within this workbook.

For all this, you need to follow the given steps:

Press the Server Tab.
Now select Create User Filter option.
Choose the dimension that needs to be mapped with each group.
Finally, move the filter to the Filter shelf.

In the last example, mapping was done between users and grades. In this scenario, we are creating a map between groups and users.

Thus these are the top three methods of implementing Tableau Row Level Security.

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