Configuring a Connection

After Installing the Connector you can connect and create a Data Source for data in TaxJar.

Setting Up a Data Source

Complete the following steps to connect to the data:

Under Connect | To a Server, click More....
Select the data source called TaxJar by CData.
Enter the information required for the connection.
Click Sign In.
If necessary, select a Database and Schema to discover what tables and views are available.

Using the Connection Builder

The connector makes the most common connection properties available directly in Tableau. However, it can be difficult to use if you need to use more advanced settings or need to troubleshoot connection issues. The connector includes a separate connection builder that allows you to create and test connections outside of Tableau.

There are two ways to access the connection builder:

On Windows, use a shortcut called Connection Builder in the Start menu, under the CData Tableau Connector for TaxJar folder.
You can also start the connection builder by going to the driver install directory and running the .jar file in the lib directory.

In the connection builder, you can set values for connection properties and click Test Connection to validate that they work. You can also use the Copy to Clipboard button to save the connection string. This connection string can be given to the Connection String option included in the connector connection window in Tableau.

Authenticating a TaxJar Account

To authenticate to the TaxJar API, you will need to first obtain the API Key from the TaxJar UI. Remember that the API is available only for Professional and Premium TaxJar plans. If you already have a Professional or Premium plan you can find the APIKey by logging in the TaxJar UI and going to Account->TaxJar API. After obtaining the API Key you can set the APIKey connection property. That's all you need to do for a successful connection.

Extra Notes

By default the connector will retrieve data of the last 3 months in case the entity supports date range filtering. You can use the StartDate to set the minimum creation date of the data retrieved.
If the API Key has been created for a sandbox API account please set UseSandbox to true in order for a successful connection.
In case you are using a sandbox API account please remember that not everything will work as expected. This is also documented in the TaxJar developer docs here: Sandbox Environment and here: Unsupported endpoints
The TaxJar API rate limiting is really generous. (10000 requests per minute for TaxJar Professional plans and 25000 per minute for the TaxJar Premium plans).
Because of the TaxJar API limits we are restricted to make an http request for each row in order to collect as much data as we can. We suggest to increase the value of the MaxThreads connection property.
The default value of MaxThreads has been set to 20 which means it will make at most 20 concurrent requests. To improve the performance of the connector consider increasing this value based on the machines resources.

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