11 Feature Requests for Custom Actions related to: (A) Reverse-ETL into CRM; (B) Alerting on Changes

[dan-man]

Use Cases

A. Reverse ETL into CRM - e.g. I want to keep a list of companies in a Looker Look in sync with a list in my CRM including company id and some other columns such as a priority rating etc.

B. Alert on Changes via email, e.g. I want to know if rows in a Looker Look receive updates or changes and send a user an email with information about the changed rows only. Maybe grouping those changes by which company they relate to.

Feature Requests related to the use cases

1. Configuration option to only show the action for Schedule not for Send. (Alerts cant be sent as a one-off so don't confuse users).
2. When a user sets up a schedule it (optionally) triggers an immediate run too rather than waiting for the first scheduled time. In the CRM case this would ensure that the first update happens immediately, rather than leaving the user confused, and in the alerts case it would ensure there is an initial snapshot against which the first schedule will calculate it's diff (subsequent runs of the alerts logic can reference the previous snapshot but it's nasty if the first scheduled run doesn't have a previous snapshot at all).
3. [connected to point 2] When setting up a schedule enforce that you must first do the test to make sure it does work. Ideally the test and schedule would share the same schedule ids to make it easier to connect the two, but with enough info in the payload to make it clear what's going on.
4. Better support for error reporting when running a test, i.e. show detailed error info to the user rather than only having it come via email with a fairly opaque message.
5. The required tags thing doesn’t seem to work for custom actions as far as i can tell (though it does seem to work for at leas the Hubspot action). Even if it did work the UX is not super helpful to users - it would be better to show the action in a disabled form, with a tooltip explaining what needs be done in order to use it (i.e. for the given explore the following columns would work, or if none in this explore then suggest some other explores that would work; and if the user doesn't have access to modify the explore it should be made clear that they need to ask the person who built it to fix it).
6. The form endpoint doesn’t know anything about the query/columns etc. which means you can’t ask the user to dynamically map columns from the Looker query to e.g. a CRM’s fields, or configure special behaviour for columns in the alert e.g. ignore small differenced in a date column.
7. The form doesn’t let you provide a description with links to docs to explain more. Given there are invariably gotchas to these kind of integrations it would be handy to be able to explain these to users in situ.
8. As far as I can tell there’s no way to mark an action hub or action as for development use only and not visible to others. For now I use a suffix [dev] for development versions but it's not ideal.
9. It would be nice to have GCS or BQ as an output format for custom actions rather than just downloading a dump file, though not really a big deal. As then you can more easily do a diff against the last run without needing to move things around.
10. Some of the advanced options and scheduling etc. might be a bit complicated for some integrations, e.g. syncing to a CRM. Also maybe some way to better warn the user about the implications of having a row limit for the particular action. Ideally the action would be able to specify no-limit if it's unlikely to ever make sense to have a limit - this would work well in conjunction with point 9 in terms of not needing to format and move data around too much.
11. There seems to be some kind of caching issue with actions which makes it a little confusing when setting up a custom action hub as it takes a few mins to actually work properly. Not a big deal, but maybe a heads up a warning of some kind would patch over this issue.