A maintained, backward-compatible fork of Tableau’s Document API with structured workbook objects, complete metadata extraction, and an integrated diff engine.
This repository is a maintained fork of Tableau's document-api-python.
The core feature of this fork is to enable programmatic comparison of Tableau workbooks, implemented through structured extraction of workbook metadata to enable programmatic comparison of changes affecting reported values.
If you are looking for the official Tableau Document API, see the upstream project.
Version 0.12 introduces several optional, backward-compatible enhancements:
- Workbook comparison — Compare two workbook versions using
Query.compare_workbooks() - Comprehensive metadata extraction — Generate a unified metadata table with
get_workbook_metadata_table() - MCP integration — AI-powered workbook comparison via Model Context Protocol
- Dashboard & worksheet objects — Structured access to child elements and usage metadata
- Datasource dependency parsing — Distinguishes field definitions from dependency instances.
- Filter parsing — Access to filter classes, groupfilters, and hierarchical filter structures.
- High-level query interface —
workbook.queryfor cross-workbook analysis and dependency mapping - Parameter parsing — Additional Field attributes (
value,param_domain_type,members) - XML string input — Create workbooks directly from raw TWB XML, enabling integration with the Tableau Server REST API.
- Command-line tool — Minimal
twb-diffCLI to compare two workbooks.
Full details and examples are available in
Version 012 Enhancements.
## Clone this repo
git clone git@github.com:jbisal/document-api-python.git
## Install package locally in editable mode
pip install -e .from tableaudocumentapi.query import Query
df_diff = Query.compare_workbooks(
wb1_filename="Workbook_v1.twbx",
wb2_filename="Workbook_v2.twbx"
)
df_diff.to_csv("df_diff.csv", index=False)twb-diff --wb1 Workbook_v1.twbx \
--wb2 Workbook_v2.twbx \
--out df_diff.csv# Add TWB-Diff to claude as a MCP server w stdio transport
claude mcp add --transport stdio TWB-Diff -- \
$(pwd)/.venv/bin/python \
-m tableaudocumentapi.mcp_server
# Ask Claude: "Compare these two Tableau workbooks and explain the differences"Installation and additional usage examples are provided in
API Reference.
- API Reference: api-ref.md
- Enhancements & examples: Version 012 Enhancements
- Original Tableau API documentation: https://tableau.github.io/document-api-python/
This fork addresses several upstream issues, including:
- #33 – Datasource Filters
- #138 – Datasource-dependencies columns passed as fields
- #164 – Expose all child objects of Workbook/Worksheet
- #246 – Missing attributes for meta-data records
- #129 – Retrieve all fields used in a workbook
For a full explanation, see the “Resolved Upstream Issues” section in Version 012 Enhancements.
All original capabilities of the Tableau Document API are preserved, including:
- Support for TWB, TWBX, TDE and TDSX files
- Access to connection information (server, username, database, authentication type, connection type)
- Updating connection details in workbooks and datasources
- Extracting field information from datasources and workbooks
For more information on the original API, see the Tableau API documentation.