Group recipients for scheduled emails (please comment if you want this!)

Hi folks,

We have groups of external users to whom we need to email Looker content. Those group memberships are managed in our own (non-Looker) configuration system and in some cases are managed by our clients directly.

We could easily sync those user groups to match corresponding groups in Looker, but one key gap remains: there is no option in Looker to add a Looker group as a recipient of a scheduled dashboard (i.e. email report).

This is critical for us and seems like a very natural feature, but the Looker team needs more clients asking for this in order to prioritize it.

Please reply here if you would use this feature. (If you’re willing, asking your account team to pass along your request to Looker’s Product team would be very helpful.)

Thanks!

Peter

P.S. An email distribution list won’t work for us here because our group definitions affect other parts of our application (and we don’t want one user to unsubscribe the whole group). Currently, we use the Looker API to send our own email, but this has created one time sink after another for our engineering team as we rebuild Looker’s native feature set.

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lindenPMP
Participant II

Agreed, setting up to send to Groups/Roles directly from Schedule a Delivery would be nice…

Perhaps you can leverage User Attributes as a workaround?  We have one UA that’s absolutely crucial to our day-to-day operations and is used in just about every single model in our instance! That said… to be honest... I can’t believe I never realized that was an option until now! 

I found an article on it, see snapshot on the details to set a delivery up using a User Attribute below:

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  1. In the Filters section, select the matches a user attribute option on the desired filter.

    The select box to the right automatically updates with a list of user attributes that are the same type as the filter. Your own value for each user attribute will be shown in parentheses.

  2. Select the desired user attribute.

  3. Check the run schedule as recipient checkbox next to the Email options field.

More on User Attributes, how to set them up, manage, etc. here: https://docs.looker.com/admin-options/settings/user-attributes

Hope this helps… let me know how it goes… best of luck to you!

lindenPMP
Participant II

Just realized it’s actually a FILTER (not an option for the recipient of scheduled content)… meaning you’d still have to enter every single e-mail address… you probably already have security features, but you could also consider pulling a list from a LookML Dashboard and then pasting applicable e-mails when creating your Schedules…  that is, if you even utilize User Attributes of course.


Add’l info from the same doc I initially quoted below, sorry for the oversight here!

Filters

Filters on ExploresLooksdashboards, and legacy dashboards can be set to a user attribute to customize the query based on the user running it.

For example, you could create a user attribute called salesforce_username and configure each Looker user so that their value for it is their Salesforce username. Then you could set a filter on a dashboard to the salesforce_username user attribute and each user would see that dashboard filtered for their particular Salesforce username.

Configuration

In the FILTERS section of the Explore, Look, or dashboard:

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  1. Select the matches a user attribute option on the desired filter.

    The select box to the right automatically updates with a list of user attributes that have the same type as the filter’s field, such as number, string (text), date, and so forth. Looker displays your value for each user attribute in parentheses.

  2. Select the desired user attribute.

Advanced filter syntax

If you’d like to do something more complex than a simple equality check for the filter, select matches (advanced) and reference the user attribute using a Liquid variable:

{{ _user_attributes['name_of_attribute'] }}

For example, suppose you need to apply an sf_ prefix to the value of the salesforce_username user attribute because that is how the values are stored in your database. To add the prefix to the user attribute value, use the _user_attributes Liquid variable syntax:

sf_{{_user_attributes['salesforce_username']}}

You can use the same pattern to insert user attributes into LookML dashboard filters and dashboard element filters.

Scheduled dashboards and Looks

Dashboard and Look filters can be set on a per-schedule basis, including the option to use a user attribute. This lets you customize the data delivery results for each email recipient. You can customize deliveries for content that are sent as one-time deliveries and recurring deliveries.

For example, you could create a user attribute called salesforce_username and set the value to each user’s Salesforce username. Set a filter on a dashboard or Look schedule to the salesforce_username user attribute so each recipient gets that dashboard filtered by their Salesforce username.

Prerequisites

Only Looker users have user attribute values set, so every recipient of the data delivery must have a Looker account. User attributes are applied by running the dashboard or Look once for each recipient.

Configuration

Open the Scheduler for the Looklegacy dashboard, or dashboard that uses the new dashboard experience:

admin-user-attributes-schedule-filters-516.png

  1. In the Filters section, select the matches a user attribute option on the desired filter.

    The select box to the right automatically updates with a list of user attributes that are the same type as the filter. Your own value for each user attribute will be shown in parentheses.

  2. Select the desired user attribute.

  3. Check the run schedule as recipient checkbox next to the Email options field.

Thanks so much for the reply. As you noted, the “matches a user attribute” filter won’t affect the recipient list.

Unfortunately, pulling a list from a LookML dashboard and pasting it into the schedule setup won’t work for us either because the groups need to be kept in sync with our own (non-Looker) configuration system. This would be no problem if we were using Looker groups.