Tableau Server 9.0 has an amazing search functionality — if you type in values into the top search box, it looks across everything available in the Tableau Server instantly and brings back results incredibly quickly. It’s not any particular secret that the Search & Browse process is powered by Apache Solr/Lucene . It’s a blazing fast piece of technology that supports a lot of the instantaneous feel in Tableau Server 9.0 (the portal and the REST API also use Solr).

I was asked recently how to do some of the same search functionality that exists in Tableau Server 9.0, but in an embedded portal. Some of it is possible via the REST API, while other requests would require opening up the PostgreSQL Repository. I wasn’t even sure some of the requests were possible — yet when I typed into the multi-search box, it seemed to be searching across all of the attributes we were looking to tap into.

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