How to authenticate and embed Tableau Rest API using Python 2.7

Question

What I am trying?

Use the sample code provided by Tableau to authenticate and generate trusted token using Tableau Rest API. I am using python v2.7

Below is the code (same as sample provided by Tableau)-:

try:

    from urllib.request import urlopen, Request
except ImportError:
        from urllib2 import urlopen, Request
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET # For parsing XML responses
server_name = "http://dashboard.crgroup.com"
user_name = "abc"   
password = "abc"
site_url_id = "default_site"         
signin_url = "http://{server}/api/2.4/auth/signin".format(server=server_name)
request_xml = ET.Element('tsRequest')
credentials = ET.SubElement(request_xml, 'credentials',
                            name=user_name, password=password)
site_element = ET.SubElement(credentials, 'site',
                             contentUrl=site_url_id)
request_data = ET.tostring(request_xml)
req = Request(signin_url, data=request_data)
req = urlopen(req)
server_response = req.read()
response_xml = ET.fromstring(server_response)
token = response_xml.find('.//t:credentials',
                          namespaces={'t': "http://tableau.com/api"}).attrib['token']
site_id = response_xml.find('.//t:site',
                            namespaces={'t': "http://tableau.com/api"}).attrib['id']
print('Sign in successful!')
print('\tToken: {token}'.format(token=token))
print('\tSite ID: {site_id}'.format(site_id=site_id))
headers = {'X-tableau-auth': token}
signout_url = "http://{server}/api/2.4/auth/signout".format(server=server_name)
req = Request(signout_url, headers=headers, data=b'')
req = urlopen(req)
print('Sign out successful!')

But I am getting an error as follow-:

Error:​

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Extract Api/testapi.py", line 42, in <module>
    req = urlopen(req)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 154, in urlopen
    return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 429, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 447, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 407, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 1228, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 1198, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 11001] getaddrinfo failed>

Note: Username/Password is correct. Also, I am able to access the URL with my browser.

Answer 1

Your .format() call is creating a bad url. Testing this in the Python REPL, I get the following:

$ server_name = "http://dashboard.crgroup.com" $ "http://{server}/api/2.4/auth/signin".format(server=server_name) (output): 'http://http://dashboard.crgroup.com/api/2.4/auth/signin'

You need to either remove "http://" from server_name or from the beginning of the string where you call .format(). The error <urlopen error [Errno 11001] getaddrinfo failed> clued me into the fact that it was probably a URL issue instead of a Tableau issue.

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