That’s pretty awesome. I think we’re a pretty long ways off from this, and it’s not yet on the roadmap, but I don’t think anyone’s suggested it before so maybe now it will be 😄
Definitely a lot to think about with this sort of thing, though, given that we schedule static images of reports to PDFs, pngs, etc. all the time. Would be super cool for HTML (or gif!) scheduling.
Not sure if you have any javascript experience on your team, but d3.js has a visualization with a pretty simple structure that may work for you. I’m just starting to teach myself JS to try to implement a few of these custom visualizations to use in Looker, hopefully I’ll be able to offer you more help soon! https://observablehq.com/@johnburnmurdoch/bar-chart-race
+1 on this feature! I’ve spent a little time thinking about this in the past (probably should have submitted a request too, but didn’t 😊). It would be a little tough given the non-hierarchical nature of SQL, however, if you were willing to make some trade-offs, you could do something similar to trellis charts and have each step in the motion be one index from a pivoted field (most likely a date field of some sort). Then the viz could iterate through each pivoted item at some specified rate sequentially and update the viz.
If table calculations had some sort of loop with a setTimeout function or if they updated in real-time instead of every time you hit run (e.g., now() function updates each second), you could even hack this together using pivot_index.
e.g., pivot_index(${column_to_show}, ${incrementing_index}) where incrementing_index increments each second.
I’m guessing this is pretty far-fetched at the moment, and doesn’t account for PDF / image downloads, but would be an amazing feature!
+1 for this feature! It seems like it would go hand-in-hand with Looker’s email scheduling feature. Would be awesome to be able to see in a single place how the looks have been trending over time