Release notes

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

NLG Apps: Additional license checking

We now check that the narrative creator has a valid Arria for Tableau license each time a narrative is generated in a dashboard or workbook.

If no valid license is found, the following error message is generated instead of a narrative:

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

New features and enhancements

Fixed issues

Known issues

NLG Apps optimizations

Arria for Tableau 3.3.0 introduces several optimizations to the Describe a Bar Chart, Time-Based Variance, Target-Based Variance, and Trend Analysis apps. You now have more control over narrative length, content, and formatting, resulting in narratives that are optimized for your specific reporting requirements and for improved readability.

See NLG Apps optimizations for details.

Arria Answers: Suggested queries are now displayed for measures with the AGG() aggregation type

Arria Answers now displays suggested queries for measures with the Agg() aggregation type.

Updates to the worksheet selected as the data source can cause issues if not saved to the Arria extension

If you rename your selected worksheet or make changes to the worksheet view — for example, removing a dimension or measure, renaming a dimension or measure, or changing the aggregation type of a measure — you must return to the Configure Your Data page, adjust the configuration as necessary, and click Save.

If the Configure Your Data page is not updated and saved, the Arria extension may generate errors, appear blank, or otherwise behave unexpectedly and it may be necessary to reload the extension by clicking Reload in the More options pop-up menu.

Arria Answers: Data configuration after making changes to the worksheet view

After making changes on the Configure Your Data page and saving them, you are returned to the Getting started with... page. If you now select Arria Answers, you are navigated to the Arria Answers Options page rather than the Attributes page.

Click Attributes to navigate to the Attributes page.

Arria for Tableau extension appearing blank to Tableau Viewers

Previously, users with the Viewer site role were unable to view NLG Apps and Arria Answers content. This is fixed in Arria for Tableau 3.2.4.

Custom narratives: Incorrect column names for measures

Arria for Tableau 3.2.2 incorrectly adds the aggregation type of a measure to its column name. This results in a mismatch between the column name in the add-in and the column name expected by existing Studio projects.

Arria for Tableau 3.2.3 fixes this issue.

NLG Apps: Support for the AGG() aggregation type

NLG Apps can now handle measures created using an aggregate calculation, provided that further aggregation by Sum or Average is valid. Such measures are displayed as AGG(MeasureName) on shelves and cards in the worksheet. For example, for a measure named Margin:

For app-specific details, see the relevant page in the NLG Apps directory.

About Arria for Tableau dialog box

You can now access an About dialog box from the Arria for Tableau context menu. The dialog box displays detailed version information, which is valuable when reporting issues to our support team.

Arria Answers: Support for single date fields

Arria Answers can now handle date values stored in a single column, as shown below. Spreading date components (year, quarter, month, and day) across multiple columns is no longer required.

Arria Answers: Two-digit year values

In addition to four-digit year values (e.g. 2022), two-digit year values (e.g. 22) are now supported.

Arria Answers: Support for additional aggregation types

Arria Answers now supports four aggregation types: Sum, Average, Minimum, and Maximum. Previously, it supported Sum aggregation only. This improvement increases your options for querying your data — see Query types for guidance.

Arria Answers: Aliases can now start with the name of another field in the dataset

Arria Answers now correctly handles fields with an alias that starts with the name of another field in the dataset. For example, if your dataset includes both a Date field and a Sales field, you can give the Date field the alias SalesDate.

Arria Answers: No suggested queries for measures with the AGG() aggregation type

Arria Answers does not generate suggested queries if one or more measures in the dataset has an Agg() aggregation type.

Arria Answers: Empty cells (null values) in dimension fields result in error messages and no suggested queries

If a non-time dimension field in your dataset — e.g. Country or Product — contains empty cells (null values), Arria Answers returns this error message:

If a time dimension field in your dataset — e.g. Date or Year — contains empty cells (null values), no suggested queries are generated and Arria Answers returns this error message:

To avoid these issues, please ensure that your dimension fields contain no empty cells.

NLG Apps: configuration of data attributes no longer lost when all filter values are deselected

We have fixed an issue that resulted in data configuration (e.g. Entity Type and Alias) being lost when using filters in a published dashboard.

Adding the first worksheet to a dashboard no longer results in a prompt to select a data source

When Arria for Tableau is added to an empty dashboard, the extension no longer erroneously generates a pop-up that prompts the user to select a replacement data source when the first worksheet is added.

When a workbook is saved for the first time using the Save As... option, Arria for Tableau no longer prompts the user to select a data source

On Tableau Server, Arria for Tableau would erroneously generate a pop-up prompting the user to select a replacement data source when a workbook was saved for the first time using the Save As... option. This has been fixed.

New NLG Apps

Arria for Tableau 3.2.0 introduces two new out-of-the-box narrative types:

Continuous dimensions not supported

Arria for Tableau supports discrete dimensions only. If the selected worksheet contains continuous dimensions, Arria for Tableau returns an error message or inaccurate narrative. See the Tableau documentation for guidance on discrete vs continuous dimensions.

NLG Apps: Trend Analysis narrative issue

The Trend Analysis app may display data instead of narrative text if the dataset includes measures with an aggregation type of Average or Minimum combined with an entity type of Percentage, Ratio, or Rating. This will be fixed in a future release.

NLG Apps: Arria for Tableau returns to the configuration page when all filter values are deselected

When all values in a filter are deselected, Arria for Tableau returns to an empty data configuration page (no dimensions or measures are displayed). To recover from this issue, select one or more values in the filter and reconfigure the narrative.

When the selected worksheet is renamed, Arria for Tableau may become unresponsive or generate an error

Arria for Tableau may become unresponsive or generate an error if you rename the selected worksheet.

To work around the issue:

Adding the first worksheet to a dashboard after adding the Arria extension results in a prompt to select a data source

If Arria for Tableau is added to an empty dashboard, the extension erroneously generates a pop-up that prompts the user to select a replacement data source when the first worksheet is added.

To use the newly added worksheet as the data source for Arria for Tableau, select it from the dropdown field and click Continue. Otherwise, click Cancel.

When a workbook is saved for the first time using the Save As... option, Arria for Tableau may erroneously prompt the user to select a data source

On Tableau Server, Arria for Tableau may generate a pop-up that prompts the user to select a replacement data source when a workbook is saved for the first time using the Save As... option. Click Continue to dismiss the erroneous pop-up.

Calculated measures with AGG() aggregation type omitted from the payload

We have fixed an issue that resulted in calculated measures with the AGG() aggregation type (measures calculated using aggregate functions) being omitted from the data payload. Such measures can now be used with custom narratives that include appropriate ATL functions in the Studio project.

NLG Apps and Arria Answers do not support the AGG() aggregation type.

Quarter date field: alphanumeric values containing spaces result in incorrect payload

We have fixed an issue that resulted in the numeric part of a Quarter date field value being dropped in the data payload if preceded by a space (e.g. 'Qtr 1' and 'Quarter 1').

Arria Answers: Calculated measures with AGG() aggregation type handled incorrectly

Arria Answers does not support measures with the AGG() aggregation type (measures calculated using aggregate functions). Rather than generating an error, Arria Answers currently treats such measures as summed measures and generates an invalid response.

Data fields with names containing parentheses omitted from the analysis

Data fields with names containing parentheses — for example, Funding ($M) — were omitted from the analysis when generating narratives or answering Arria Answers queries. This has been fixed.

NLG Apps: Support for additional aggregation and entity types

Arria for Tableau 3.1 introduces NLG Apps support for measures aggregated by Average, Minimum, Maximum, and Count, and precalculated measures such as percentages, ratings, and ratios.

See Aggregation and entity types for further information.

NLG Apps: Support for date fields and non-standard date field names

Previous versions of NLG Apps supported only the following date hierarchy components: year, quarter, month, and day. Fields containing these date components were required to be named Year, Quarter, Month, or Day, respectively.

Arria for Tableau 3.1 introduces NLG Apps support for date fields and for a wider range of recognized field names.

See the NLG Apps Data field names and formats topic for details.

MONTH(Date) field mistinterpreted

Previously, Arria for Tableau misinterpreted the value in a date hierarchy's MONTH(Date) field as a full date. For example, the month of May was translated as 2021-05-01T00:00:00.000z rather than 5. This has been fixed.

Note

Following this fix, custom narrative Studio projects that expect a full date for the MONTH(Date) field, will no longer work.

To work around this issue, set Date fields to Exact Date.

Custom Narratives: Narrative not generated when white space around Studio project URL or API key

In the Custom Narratives feature, if Studio project URLs or API keys were pasted into the UI with a space before or after them, the narrative could not be generated and the following error was displayed:

This has been fixed.

Support for non-aggregated measures

The Tableau Dashboard Extension API does not provide a way to identify that measures have been disaggregated (by disabling the Analysis > Aggregate Measures option). Therefore, at present, raw data that comprises percentages, ratings, and ratios cannot be analyzed by Arria for Tableau.

Arria Answers: Alias cannot start with the name of another field

There is a known issue when you give a field an alias (e.g. SalesDate) that starts with the name of another field (e.g. Sales). In this case, Arria Answers does not correctly process queries that use the alias: it uses the other field (Sales) instead of the field to which you assigned the alias. This problem is also indicated by incorrect color markup when you type the query.

Users automatically signed out from generated narrative and Arria Answers pages

When the Arria extension is left idle on a configuration page, users are automatically signed out after one hour of inactivity.

When the Arria extension is left idle on a generated narrative page, or on the Arria Answers query page, users should never be signed out. However, users were sometimes signed out from these pages in version 3.0.0 of the extension. This has been fixed in version 3.0.1.

NLG Apps

NLG Apps (built from a feature formerly known as Configure Narrative) introduces five new out-of-the-box narrative types. In addition to the original Descriptive Statistics, Time-based Variance, and Target-based Variance analyses, you can now analyze and narrate your charts using the Trend Analysis, Ranking Analysis, Describe a Pie Chart, Describe a Bar Chart, and Describe a Line Chart apps.

See NLG Apps for an overview, and the NLG Apps directory for details of each app.

Arria Answers

Arria Answers for Tableau is a new conversational-AI platform that integrates with Tableau dashboards to give users real-time access to key insights from data, using natural language-queries.

See Arria Answers for details.

New Arria for BI subscription

To configure Arria for Tableau, you must log in to the extension with your Arria account credentials and have an Arria for BI license.

See Arria accounts and licenses for details.

Arria-Hosted Private Cloud and Customer-Hosted deployment options

Users of the Arria-Hosted Private Cloud (a.k.a. Dedicated Cloud) and Customer-Hosted (a.k.a. On-Premises) deployment options can no longer use the publicly available Arria for Tableau extension.

Instead, a unique instance of the add-in configured to call your exclusive Arria for Tableau services, must be installed.

Please contact us for details.

Underlying Data Narrative for option no longer supported

The Tableau Dashboard Extensions API, used to fetch data when the Arria for Tableau 2.2.0 Narrative for option is set to Underlying Data, allows a maximum of 10,000 rows to be passed to extensions. Larger datasets are truncated at the first 10,000 rows.

Because of this limitation, Underlying Data is no longer supported: a worksheet must be selected as the data source for the extension.

Support for fields containing logical data (true/false values)

Arria for Tableau now supports fields containing logical data (true/false values). Previously, if the dataset included logical fields the extension would hang during generation of the narrative.

Frozen extension window: Tableau for Desktop on Windows

Navigating away from the dashboard sheet — either to other sheets in the workbook, or to other applications — may result in the extension window freezing. To unfreeze the window, adjust its size slightly.

Tableau has logged a bug report for this issue and it will be fixed in a future release.

Renaming of selected worksheet causes error (Unable to complete action)

Renaming the worksheet selected in the Arria extension leads to an error (Unable to complete action) when attempting to generate the narrative.

To resolve the issue, remove the worksheet from the dashboard and re-add it. Then, on the Configure Your Data page of the Arria extension, reselect the worksheet.

To prevent the issue, remove the worksheet from the dashboard before renaming it. Once renamed, re-add it to the dashboard and select it again on the Configure Your Data page.

NLG Apps: removing dimensions may lead to missing insights

Removing dimensions on the Configure Your Data page, or on the data attributes page in the NLG apps wizard, can lead to missing insights in NLG Apps narratives.

To resolve this issue, use a worksheet with only the dimensions required for your narrative added to the view.

Arria Answers: Arria extension freezes when selected worksheet is removed from the dashboard

When using Arria Answers, removing the selected worksheet leads to the extension freezing.

To resolve the issue, click Reload in the More Options pop-up menu, then select a new worksheet on the Configure Your Data page.

To prevent this issue, select a new worksheet on the Configure Your Data page before removing the current one.

Arria Answers: Modifying the selected worksheet may cause errors

Arria Answers is not automatically updated when fields are added or removed from the selected worksheet view, leading to unexpected errors being returned in response to questions.

To resolve the issue, reload the Arria extension by clicking Reload in the More options pop-up menu.

Custom Narratives: Narrative not generated when white space around Studio project URL or API key

In the Custom Narratives feature, if Studio project URLs or API keys are pasted into the UI with a space before or after them, the narrative cannot be generated and the following error is displayed: