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Looker 6.6 Release Notes

  • 6 February 2019
  • 12 replies
  • 296 views
hilary
Rank

Release Rollout Begins: February 9, 2019

Release Final & Download Available: February 21, 2019




Release Highlights


In addition to general tweaks and enhancements, this release comes with new and improved features in the following categories. Read on for more detail.



Preparing for Release


Please take notice of items marked with a ⚡ as they indicate changes to existing functionality and may require your attention. For more information see the Legacy Feature Updates and Features by Section below.





Notable Features


Trellis Charts


Trellis charts allow users to break cartesian charts into a series of smaller visualizations on the same scale and axes, allowing for easier comparison of complex data.


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Redesigned User Activation Email


Activating new Looker User accounts just got a lot more straightforward and inviting. New activation email invites users to activate their account with a single, central call to action designed to increase activation rates.

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Features by Section


Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore




  • Trellis charts. The new Grid Layout visualization option makes trellis charts available for all cartesian charts. Learn more.


  • ⚗ Merged Results on LookML Dashboards. Users can now use merged results tiles on LookML Dashboards. Learn more.


  • ⚡ Completely removed the “Legacy Visualizations” Legacy Feature. Learn more.


  • ⚡ Disabled the “Legacy Rendering” Legacy Feature. It may be temporarily reenabled on the Legacy Features page if needed to help your transition. If you have not already, please install Chromium to continue rendering PDF and PNGs. Learn more.


Downloads and Scheduling




  • Expand tables on PDF Downloads. New option to expand tables on PDF downloads to ensure all rows are visible. Learn more.


Platform and Administration




  • ⚡⚗ Changed interactive API doc URLs. The URLs for interactive API docs now disambiguate between API 3.0 and the beta API 3.1.


  • Redesigned user activation email. New email with single call to action designed to make new user activation simpler.


  • Added support for OpenJDK. Learn more.


  • Refactored Google Authentication. In preparation for Google’s deprecation of the Google+ API on March 7, Looker no longer utilizes the Google+ API for Google Authentication. Learn more.


LookML and Development




  • SQL Runner Search out of beta. All Looker customers can now use the search bar in the SQL runner to locate specific fields in connected databases.


  • Localized LookML Dashboards. Developers are now able to use the .strings file type to specify localization parameters for LookML Dashboards. Learn more.


  • ⚡ Completely removed the “Native Derived Tables Convert Dates and Yesnos to Strings” Legacy Feature. Learn more.


  • Introduced the group_item_label parameter to allow you to change how a field appears in the field picker when nested under a group_label. Learn more.


Dialects




  • Snowflake. Added support for List measure.


General Tweaks and Bug Fixes




  • Dialects

    • Fixed a bug where the LookML generator did not properly escape hyphens for certain dialects.




  • Administration and Platform

    • Users with the see_system_activity permission can now download the System Activity dashboard.

    • Fixed a bug where the HTTPS git connection option did not correctly support user attributes.




  • Dashboards, Visualizations, and Explore

    • Fixed a bug where the starts with string filter incorrectly returned no results when used with quotation marks.

    • Fixed a bug where Single Value visualizations produced the wrong error when no results were returned.

    • Fixed a bug where trend lines on cartesian charts sometimes appeared behind data.

    • Fixed a bug where values on stacked percentage columns did not always add up to 100.

    • Fixed a bug where visualization labels for fields that contain a ' did not render correctly.

    • Fixed a bug where scatterplot visualizations did not display on Internet Explorer.

    • Fixed a bug where percent previous visualizations were not available unless the Legacy Visualizations legacy feature was turned on.




  • LookML and Development

    • Fixed a bug where switching LookML files triggered a full page refresh.

    • Fixed a bug where queries with totals created using the create_queries endpoint sometimes produced and error.

    • Fixed a bug where liquid HTML in label parameter for dimension group did not always render correctly.




  • Scheduling and Downloading

    • Fixed a bug where sending Excel schedules sometimes caused an error message.

    • Fixed a bug where scheduled emails were sometimes blank.




  • Embedded Analytics

    • Fixed a bug where the subtotals visualization was broken in the embed context.




  • Security

    • Added integrity checking to database connection configuration data.



12 replies

B
Userlevel 5
Badge

Awesome to see Trellis Charts on this! I think this one’s going to be a business user favourite.

Rich1000
Userlevel 3

Amazing stuff, I’m really excited to see Trellis charts.


As you can see I’ve been waiting for quite some time!


https://discourse.looker.com/t/chart-facets-like-ggplot2/2718

izzy
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

The weirdest part is that the engineer here who finally built them is named Richard, AND your tiny discourse picture looks eerily like him. (The effect kinda fades when you blow up the picture, but, whatever).


spooky stuff.

izzy
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

cc @RichardCzechowski to meet another trellis-loving Richard.

D

Wow, this is the first time in a year that I’ve been excited by something in the release notes. Trellis charts are a game changer. Please can there always be something this useful in a looker release?!?

davidbo
Userlevel 2

Very interested by the Trellis charts but noticed that you can’t set individual reference lines or trend lines per grid item. Is this going to be implemented? At the moment reference/trend lines are unfortunately not useful with Trellis charts but I think they could be a valuable resource.

Dawid
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

In regards to the Trellis Chart. Should it not honour the order of the column by which the individual charts are ordered? Also each chart should be allowed to have individual Y axis. Sometimes we want to look at different volume of data expecting the same curves. Currently they will all get the largest chart’s Y axis scale.

Dawid
izzy
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

This is great feedback, thanks all! I’ve raised it internally.

nolan-ga
Userlevel 1

Want to +1 the independent y-scale and trendlines for the trellis charts. I’ve been trying to use them now for a little over a month and most times I’ve reverted to another chart type because of the current limitations of the implementation.


Adding one other pain point that isn’t unique to trellis charts, but is certainly exacerbated by the additional padding / layout elements that it uses. When using trellis charts, I often end up losing the x-labels for the groups as well as (and especially) any value labels. It seems to be an issue related to spacing around chart elements and other series / collision detection. So far the only solution I’ve found is to make it enormous in a dashboard and even then, it may not work for someone else’s screen size.


Any suggestions?


At 643 px tall, neither the facet names nor the values will display. At 743px I get facet names.

image


Not until 1100 px tall do I get both, which goes beyond the browser’s viewheight, even if I zoom way out.

image

izzy
Userlevel 7
Badge +1

Thanks for the feedback, Nolan— Taking a look at this.

Ezra_Wolfe
Userlevel 2

I’ve noticed the same issue with the labels/values. In a dashboard this is particularly awkward.

nolan-ga
Userlevel 1

Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help QA. I realized that I didn’t mention I run Chrome, currently on Version 72.0.3626.121. Many of my end users are on Safari as well.

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