I’ve always enjoyed working with Tableau Server, because it is pretty hackable.

The new Application Server component (known as “VizPortal”) is something completely new, however. Can I do the same sort of stuff with it I could in v8?

I don’t know, frankly – but let’s start finding out, bit-by-bit.

First, the login screen.

I have to say, the first time I saw the v9 login page I just got a big smile on my face. It promised really good things ahead. It’s not often a login page makes me happy, but this sucker did it.

 

Still, it might be nice to be able to add a note or reminder or some sort of text to this screen. NOTE: Doing this in v8, v9, or any other version of Tableau Server is completely unsupported. Make a backup and don’t call Technical Support if you break something.

One could inject arbitrary text into the login page in v8, and one can do so in v9, too. Here’s a simple example:

So we got that going for us. VizPortal is built with AngularJS, and all the HTML fragments that are used in the single page app can be found in C:Program FilesTableauTableau Server9.0vizportalclientpublic<language>. The particular page I needed was login.html.  Here I am in Brackets adding my own <div> and some text:

Full sized image here.

With a bit of effort, you can get a  more…creative? egregious? I’ve got Tomorrow Never Knows off  Revolver playing, so how about something psychedelic?

Click below…wait for it…

I’m sorry UI team, I really am. The monstrosity above required a bit of hacking at the vizportal.css file to add a background image and some image manipulation to make the Tableau logo white. But not too tough.

So, the jury is in. Yes. You can hack the Tableau Server login page in v9. But please don’t make your login screen look like the pic above (unless you live in Washington, Colorado, Alaska or Oregon).

Edit, much later: If you are on 9.2+ and can’t get this to work, things have changed (remember, this is unsupported. ). Each page you might consider hacking now has a .gz file associated with it. You must either modify and rezip the page inside the gz archive, or DELETE the archive and the html page will get utilized.