Diagnosing the issue

When Tableau Desktop Users connect to a data source, if they want users to be able to view their visualizations, the users must also have access to the data source. Otherwise, the viewer may encounter the following error:

Open

Notice that this is different from having access to the dashboard itself. If a user is provided a URL for a dashboard that they are not granted permission to view, they will see this view instead:

Open

Access to the data source can be provisioned in two ways:

1. The user can be granted direct access to the data; or

2. the author/publisher can grant viewers access to the data by embedding their credentials, as shown below.

Embed Credentials

When the user publishes the Workbook to Tableau, there should be a link under Data Sources that opens the ‘Manage Data Sources’ menu. From there, the author can review whether or which data sources people can/should be granted access through via the author’s credentials.

If the data source is an embedded SQL query, then the user will need read-access to whatever database schema and table(s) used in the SQL query. So for example, if the author is using an embedded SQL query against ST_ENROLLMENT, and the ‘Prompt User’ option is selected, then the user must also be granted access via the warehouse tables / Fed Auth.

If the author is using a Published Tableau Data Sources (which are shown with the Tableau icon next to them, as shown below), the user would not necessarily need access to the warehouse tables (unless Row-level-Security is being applied/used), however, the dashboard viewers would need to be granted view permission at the published Tableau Data Source level.