Looker Life Hacks (Join Me!)

One of my favorites has been option+click on the legend when a pivot makes the chart too cluttered. By default, clicking an item in the legend will hide/show its corresponding line/bar in the chart, doing so while holing down option will hide/show everything else. Becomes really useful when you have 10+ pivot columns, but here’s an example with just a few:

From another account of mine… fold your LookML wherever you want by adding bracket pairs inside comments:

# loads of dimensions I want to fold {

... lots of lookml ...

# } end of all the dimensions I want to fold

This is such a great idea! One of my favorites that I learned recently is “Cmd-J” or “Ctrl-J” to jump to a specific file in the IDE.

This is super useful for navigating around the IDE quickly, especially when you’ve got a ton of files! I’m so excited to see what else y’all have to share 😃

Kinda remembered this one way after the fact, but…

If you want to quickly add a hidden field to your explore, just append &f[view.field]=0 to your current URL. This will add the field as an additional filter, without interfering with your other selected dimensions and filters, then you can add the field to your table, if desired, by using the gear menu from the newly applied filter

Izzy, I’ve got a chrome search shortcut set up just for Discourse too ❤

If I can add my usd_2 (LookML joke):

On Mac:

Command + Option + 0 to fold all LookML in current file

Command + Option + shift + 0 to unfold all LookML in current file

I guess replace Option with Alt on other OS.

It changed my life!

Thought I’d add some more here and bump the thread (and partly as I’ve posted about some spurious non-issues recently 😊) . Maybe we can get some more contributions before the end of the week.

Some IDE/code related ones:

• Looker will replace underscores with spaces and capitalise words in field identifiers so you don’t always need to specify a label - it also understands and capitalises some acronyms. The ones I know about are: id, url, uri, http, html, json, sql, usd, sku, ip, isp, api, cpu - are there any more/an official list?

• If select some code, you can move the whole block up or down by holding alt/option and using the up & down keys - the rest of code moves around it so you can reorganise your code easily


• The IDE can be set to Vim or Emacs mode under your account settings so you can use familiar keyboard shortcuts


• You can develop LookML outside of Looker if you want to use features of your favourite text editor, though after committing/pushing your code you need to pull it in the Looker IDE to see your changes. There might be a way to automate this with the API though I haven’t worked that out yet


• If you’re using an external code editor, set it to use YAML syntax highlighting and it’ll do a fairly good job (I know old LookML was just plain YAML, maybe New LookML is too or very close)


• More of a personal preference, but for ‘list’ type parameters (fields, timeframes etc) putting each item on its own line is more readable, lets you comment out individual lines, and gives you useful git diffs


• Always put a newline at the end of files, otherwise git diffs can end up broken


• Emojis render in the IDE, labels/descriptions and git commits and can be useful/fun for drawing attention to certain things ⚠
  

And one last one:

• If you use extended Explores, you can switch a query from one to the other (assuming the fields used exist in both) by changing the explore slug in the URL e.g. /explore/model_slug/base_explore_slug?qid=5wCRdZq7bzbep21MGPTmDi
  
  –>
  
  /explore/model_slug/extended_explore_slug?qid=5wCRdZq7bzbep21MGPTmDi
  
  and vice versa.

And this works when creating table calcs too… Revolutionary

This is wild! @fabio was so casual about already knowing this, but this totally blew my mind too.

from @gregono1:

this is exactly what I came looking for, thank you very much!

This is such a cool thread, thanks for starting!