Being signed in to your Shopify account, select Apps, and then select Alpha Serve Tableau Connector.
Select New data source.
In the Name field, enter the data source name.
In the Description field, enter the description of your data source.
In the Connector type field, select the preferable type of connection: OData 4.0 or Web Data Connector 2.0 (deprecated).
[Optional] If needed, schedule automatic data update.
There are 4 possible options in the Scheduler menu.
Disabled - in this case, you will be able to update this data source manually when needed;
Continuous - in this case, the data source with this schedule type will be updated constantly. The data preparation process will start after the previous one is completed.
Every day - in this case, the data source will be updated every day at the selected time.
Weekly - in this case, the data source will be updated only once a week on the selected day and time.
The Scheduler menu depends on your subscription plan.
Select all fields and filters you need.
On the left, you can see tabs with all data types available for export. Each tab contains the corresponding tables and fields that you can select. This helps you navigate easily among numerous tables and data types.
Learn the Entity-Relationship Diagram to understand all the connections and correlations between tables.
Check information about the data types supported by the Tableau Connector here.
Filters allow you to limit data based on several criteria, so your BI app does not need to get a complete list of results and then parse through it on its own.
You can combine multiple filters for data.
When everything is done, select Save.
Go back to the Data sources page.
After the successful creation of a data source, you have to prepare it for export.
The newly-created data source has the NOT READY status.
Select Generate.
The status will be changed to PENDING, and then to IN PROGRESS.
Shopify allows you to prepare only one data source at a time. Therefore, if several sources are being prepared, they queue up one after the other.
Once the status is READY, it means you can start exporting your data.
If you make some changes to your data source, its status will become NOT READY again.
Data Source Statuses Overview
The data source has several statuses:
NOT READY indicates that the data source has just been created and is not ready for export.
PENDING is activated when selecting the Generate button. The status indicates that the system is preparing to create a data source snapshot.
IN PROGRESS indicates that the snapshot is being created for your data source. It will be valid for export for 7 days after generating a snapshot.
READY indicates the readiness of your data source to be exported.
EXPIRED indicates that the snapshot is expired and you need to regenerate it.
If you use automatic data update, the data source snapshot will be constantly valid.
The speed of data preparation depends on the amount of data you’ve selected. Most data sources preparation takes a few minutes. But sometimes this can take even hours, for example, if there are thousands of rows to be prepared.
To speed up the data preparing process:
Apply filters to reduce queried data.
Try removing some fields from your query so that preparing can run faster.
Break up the data source into smaller parts.
If you need assistance with it, please, contact our Support team.