"Point & Click" Editing of Dashboard LookML Files While Retaining Version Control?

[ssurendranath]

To preface all of this, I only started to learn Looker last week. So I apologize if my intuition of the software is very primitive.

The company I work for utilizes version control via Github and LookML files. There are files for views, models, and dashboards. Now when I go into development mode and it auto allocates me into a personal branch, I get. Also for any files other than dashboards, I have had success understanding and going through the workflow to maintain integrity of my edits and any subsequent PR and merge process that needs to be done.

With dashboards, I’m just not getting the same confidence. When I first started, I assumed once I was in Development Mode, that I was safe from messing with any final or main structures that are there. So when an edit needed to happen for a dashboard, I edited the View file to add the dimensions required and proceeded to utilize them in the dashboard.

What I had not realized was that because I was in my personal branch, the Dashboard edits I made (by the way the edit was done front end or point & click style) reflected how they should. But when switching off Development Mode, to my horror, the dashboards weren’t working, because the edit I made persisted and they were broken, because the dimensions I added in my personal branch to a view file were obviously not merged yet to the main branch.

This leads me to conclude that editing dashboards has to be done at a code level. And even if we have dashboard files that are version controlled, they can be overriden by frontend edits that don’t have any handcuffs to go through the version control process.

So an organization has to create the protocol to never edit dashboards via frontend and to only edit the code of the dashboards. This leads to weird workflows like quickly editing the frontend, copy the code, undo and changes that was made, go to the LookML code in development mode and paste the code, THEN go through the PR process to get it merged into the main branch. 

That’s just my observations from my very, very limited time using the platform. I’m hoping someone in this community can confirm or correct my understanding. And I apologize for the wall of text and thank you to anyone who read the entire thing!

[CarlAnderson]

I’m in the same situation as you. A few things have seemed a little surprising to me since starting to use Looker. Overall it works well, but not really having a way to version control Dashboards to sync with model changes makes me a little concerned. If it didn’t work so well for what we are doing, and take a lot of the set up and overhead off my hands I’d be really concerned.