Editor’s Note: Parameter Actions solves this natively in Tableau without any additional effort! Ignore everything below and just upgrade!

Tableau’s actions are very powerful for creating interactive visualizations, but there are a couple of common use cases that are not possible out of the box in Tableau Desktop.

1. An Action cannot cause a Parameter to be filled with the results of that selection
2. An Action from a Primary Data Source cannot be a Filter on a Secondary Data Source.

Using the JavaScript API, you can easily solve the first issue, and from there solve issue #2.

Potential use cases include geospatial calculations where a selected point can become the new reference longitude and latitude for the calculation, or when using data blended onto Custom Polygons.

(more…)