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Add support for animated GIFs

Open jdrummey opened this issue 8 years ago • 2 comments

Paul Chapman had a blog post recently about putting animated GIFs of sets of views in a Tableau Server Project as a graphical way to show what's in the Project: https://thatdatavizguy.com/2016/04/27/how-can-you-make-tableau-server-project-folders-more-interesting/

I'm thinking this would be a "bling" feature, it would be done by:

  1. making it an optional install for the extra required libraries
  2. add the necessary arguments for content references
  3. using the same logic as for merging PDFs, only this time it would be merging image attachments
  4. enabling file export of the animated GIFs
  5. I'm presuming users would want to email them as well and the way the logic is right now that would be more complicated to implement. #5 in particular is an argument for having a more object-oriented approach in the code.

jdrummey avatar May 07 '16 12:05 jdrummey

I finally understand the benefit of this feature, and I think it's a cool idea. It makes even more sense in a post-2.1.0 world, where the viz contains non-alerting marks as well as alerting marks--the better to show the context behind the alert. It could provide even greater context for previous data states on how a situation came to be. There's no need for the user to click a link, go to Server, load the viz up, then trying to filter for previous daily snapshots.

It'd sure be nice if it could automatically store the previous N alert tests in image form. I know of a lot of vizzes that don't really have the ability to go back in time, because the data has been updated, and we don't do historical logging--and even if we did, the viz isn't set up to allow for it. If the viz was, you'd still need to do something like:

VIZ_IMAGE(workbook/view?day=1|filename=animated.gif|mergeimages) VIZ_IMAGE(workbook/view?day=2|filename=animated.gif|mergeimages) VIZ_IMAGE(workbook/view?day=3|filename=animated.gif|mergeimages)

It would be nicer to do something like:

VIZ_IMAGE(workbook/view?|filename=animated.gif|mergeimages=3)

...then VizAlerts would retrieve the last three images it stored when it checked the alert, and automatically compile them into a gif for you. It'd mean extra processing that would be largely wasted, though, so we'd have to take that into consideration, if we did implement something like that.

I do like the idea of using this in conjunction with the proposed File Actions, too. Daily image snapshots to a folder, then grab all of them with a content reference and package them into an animation. That'd be pretty cool!

mcoles avatar Aug 08 '17 00:08 mcoles

I like it!

Here’s a thought:

  1. Design the updated logging feature with this feature in mind so we can have a persistent store that relates downloads & file locations.
  2. Build out File Actions with this feature in mind, the generalization being that a file action is “do something to a group of files” and file actions being smart enough to use the downloaded files if the user isn’t specifying locations.
  3. Build out this feature.

Jonathan

On Aug 7, 2017, at 8:04 PM, Matt <[email protected] mailto:[email protected]> wrote:

I finally understand the benefit of this feature, and I think it's a cool idea. It makes even more sense in a post-2.1.0 world, where the viz contains non-alerting marks as well as alerting marks--the better to show the context behind the alert. It could provide even greater context for previous data states on how a situation came to be. There's no need for the user to click a link, go to Server, load the viz up, then trying to filter for previous daily snapshots.

It'd sure be nice if it could automatically store the previous N alert tests in image form. I know of a lot of vizzes that don't really have the ability to go back in time, because the data has been updated, and we don't do historical logging--and even if we did, the viz isn't set up to allow for it. If the viz was, you'd still need to do something like:

VIZ_IMAGE(workbook/view?day=1|filename=animated.gif|mergeimages) VIZ_IMAGE(workbook/view?day=2|filename=animated.gif|mergeimages) VIZ_IMAGE(workbook/view?day=3|filename=animated.gif|mergeimages)

It would be nicer to do something like:

VIZ_IMAGE(workbook/view?|filename=animated.gif|mergeimages=3)

...then VizAlerts would retrieve the last three images it stored when it checked the alert, and automatically compile them into a gif for you. It'd mean extra processing that would be largely wasted, though, so we'd have to take that into consideration, if we did implement something like that.

I do like the idea of using this in conjunction with the proposed File Actions, too. Daily image snapshots to a folder, then grab all of them with a content reference and package them into an animation. That'd be pretty cool!

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jdrummey avatar Aug 08 '17 14:08 jdrummey