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.
- An Action cannot cause a Parameter to be filled with the results of that selection
- 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.
