How do I get a list of dashboards that a user has access to via the API?

[LookerExperts]

Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Dec 28, 2017
 

First, you will want to pull down the content_metadata_id and id fields from every dashboard using the all_dashboards endpoint. We don't need the other fields, so limiting to just those two helps save some time.

Be sure to grab the dashboard folder's content_metadata_id, rather than the dashboard's content_metadata_id. (Both are included in the response from the all_dashboards endpoint.) The content access information for dashboards (and Looks) is associated with the folder's content_metadata_id, since you manage content access at the folder-level. Using the dashboard's content_metadata_id will give you an empty result from the all_content_metadata_access endpoint you'll use next.

Next, use the all_content_metadata_access endpoint to pull down all of the content access information. Each content_metadata object has a list of group IDs that have access to the content represented by it. From there, you will want to map group_id to content_metadata_id to the dashboard id from the first step.

For a given user, you will want to find all of the content_metdata_id from all_content_metdata_access which give access to any group they are a part of, and then you will easily be able to list the dashboard IDs that correspond to them.

Alternate approach:

1. As an admin, call login_as_user(user_id), passing in the id of the user in question. This will return an access_token that will run as the specified user.
2. Call all_dashboards() using the access_token obtained above.
3. Done! 🙂 As with all API functions, the responses are filtered to only return the data that the caller has permission to see.

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