Editor’s Note: Huge thanks to special contributor Gordon Rose for this blog post.

Tableau helps people see and understand their data – and guarantees that it in the process, it will never make any changes to that data. Tableau is a strictly read-only technology. However, many customers want the ability to modify the data that lies behind a Tableau visualization (Viz), and then, either see those changes immediately reflected in the Viz and/or make other applications aware of those changes. With a small amount of supporting technology, Tableau’s read-only behavior can easily be integrated into so-called “write-back” use cases.

In this blog article, we’ll explore a way to do exactly that – one in which the write-back components are external to the Viz. An alternative approach is one in which those components are more tightly integrated into the Viz itself – that’s for a later blog article to explore. Ideally you will find that you can use one of these two approaches as a launching point for the development of your own write-back use case.

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