Looker Connect Training

Help Center

Documentation

Community

Cloud Certifications

The Kitchen Table

Explore the product knowledge we've built up together

2115 Topics

Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Referencing the Quarter Timeframe in table calcsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 25, 2020 Say you're using a quarter timeframe that results in 2020-Q2, for example. If you were to create a table calculation referencing this, sayif(to_string(${quarter_field}) = "2020-Q2", ${arbitrary_field}, null)You would never satisfy the Yes condition of the if() statement. This is due to the fact that quarter timeframes are being transformed via html from the format yyyy-mm to `yyyy-Qm`. We can confirm this is we open up the query in SQL Runner!SolutionSince the quarter timeframes are actually appearing like "2020-01" for Q1, "2020-04" for Q2 and so on, you want to reference that date rather than the quarter format. Like so:if(to_string(${quarter_field}) = "2020-04", ${arbitrary_field}, null)  Now you should see the Yes condition properly evaluated! This content is subject to limited support.                  

1570
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

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

4790
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

System Activity History: Result source is "stale_cache"Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 28, 2020 If the value for the History table's Result Source field is "stale_cache", this can be the result of an instant dashboard. When instant dashboards are turned on, the results can return from a cache that has expired (aka "stale" cache).The dashboard should rerun when this happens. This content is subject to limited support.                  

310
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can we define a view: parameter within a Model file? An explore: within a View file?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 28, 2021 This is technically possible, but we recommend against it, mainly for readability and organizational purposes. There are very few instances where it would be recommended/preferable to do this.You can technically define any object you want inside any file. The LookML parser starts at a model file, and then prepends the model file with any files in include: statements, making one "giant file". So, in this way, it doesn't really matter which file view or explore objects are defined in.For best practices, it is much cleaner to keep all explores inside model files, to keep view objects inside view files, and to only define one view per view file. You may encounter atypical types of modeling either in discourse examples, like this one, where we give an example like this:connection: "bigquery_publicdata_standard_sql" explore: persons {join: persons_cities_lived {....join: persons_phone_number {.....}} view: persons {} view: persons_cities_lived {....} view: persons_p

320
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I see user event activity in system activity? For example, seeing which users committed code?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 13, 2020 Yes, we have the /event and /event_attribute explores in system activity. Those explores will have Event Category and Event Names. The event_attribute explore has more robust information on the details of things that were changed.A few example Event Names are below:create_project login create_connection create_dashboard update_dashboard git_commit git_create_branch git_delete_branch create_role update_role create_content_metadata_access delete_content_metadata_accessCheck out this doc to see a comprehensive list of all event types.Here are some examples of cool things you can find:Event Explore use cases Event Attribute Explore use cases This content is subject to limited support.                  

240
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

${TABLE} is not allowed in the 'X' property.Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 29, 2019 If you get an e-mail with a schedule error and it says ${TABLE} is not allowed in the 'X' property, this because you are using ${TABLE} outside of a sql parameter.Example of where this would fail:dimension: test {type: stringsql: ${TABLE}.field ;;# The below html references are incorrect. Substitution operators (the ${}) can't be used in html because they evaluate to SQL.html: My values are ${TABLE}.field and ${otherfield ;;} To fix this, use liquid references instead!dimension: test {type: stringsql: ${TABLE}.field ;;# {{value}} is how you reference the value of this field, and {{viewname.fieldname._value}} is how you reference the values of other fields.html: My values are {{value}} and {{otherfield._value}} ;;} This content is subject to limited support.                  

530
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is there a way to get rid of the "Row limit reached" message, when we drill down in the explore?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 28, 2021 Not at the moment, but you can share your request with the Product team via Pendo! This content is subject to limited support.                  

1990
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What could cause the purple loading bar to get stuck?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 24, 2020 This is probably either due to an intermittent outage on the load balancer, or because an incomplete Javascript chunk has been cached on the browser.The only network requests that are sent while that loading bar is animating are for fetching the JS code that's responsible for things like rendering UI elements and visualizations (these are the "chunks" that you see in the network tab as a page loads). Therefore if fetching the chunks goes wrong somehow, you could get stuck on that page with the loading bar partially filled.Possible solutions to this are basically to bust the browser cache: hard refresh of the browser (cmd+shift+r) or enable the CDN, which will pull new resources since they'll be coming from a new URL. This content is subject to limited support.                  

430
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

500 Error on Add To ProjectKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 2, 2020 Problem: Receiving the error: "Uh Oh! Something went wrong. 500" when selecting "Add to project" from SQL Runner, in order to add a query straight to a derived table view.Console Error: Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error)Log Error: Looker::Model::InvalidFileNameError : File view_name.view.lkml already exists.Troubleshooting: The root cause of this issue is when we already created a view with the same name. Changing the view name, or deleting the existing view, solved this error. This content is subject to limited support.                  

3250
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

AssertionError in SDK callKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 30, 2020 Users of the SDK have seen this error in the past when using a dictionary syntax rather that using the WriteUser type in the bodyEx. GOODimport looker_sdkfrom looker_sdk import modelsnew_friend = sdk.update_user(user_id=#, body=models.WriteUser(first_name="first_name_test",last_name="last_name_test")) Ex. BAD import looker_sdknew_friend = sdk.me()print(new_friend)updated_user = sdk.update_user(user_id = #, body = {"User":{"first_name" : "first_name_test","last_name" : "last_name_test","group_ids" : "[#]"}} )print("updated_user: " + updated_user)  Does that mean when we reference the body we should always put a 'Write' in front of the call?Explanation that we could share with the customer:We have model objects (or classes) that we pass args into and Looker does the formatting for us. Our team is currently working on making the body parameters a bit more friendly, but right now, we recommend passing them into the model classes/objects and let the SDK do the work

120
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to Handle \n in dimensions - Newline_to_br LiquidKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 24, 2019 Liquid Reference for newlinedimension: variable {type: stringsql: ${TABLE}.variable ;;html: {{ variable | newline_to_br }} ;;} This content is subject to limited support.                  

1680
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Nicholas_Alexander
Moderator
Nicholas_AlexanderModerator
published in Common Account Questions

Can I enable SAML on my instance?

Looking to create some added/different security to your Looker instance via SAML? Looker is well equipped for that, and multiple customers have enabled this for peace of mind, to fit their use case, or various other reasons! Have a look at this intuitive doc, on how to get started, the setup needed, and how to work with us to get this enabled!  Question on this process? Feel free to comment below

610
Nicholas_Alexander
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Troubleshooting Slack action errorsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 28, 2020 You may see one of the following error messages when setting up and testing the Slack action in the Action Hub:Error: An error occurred for action looker-integration://1::slack_app. The action could not be executed.There may be a temporary issue with Looker instance=https://host_name.looker.com. Please try again in a few minutes.Both of these are catch-all error messages, so they could indicate any of a number of different errors. Most likely the error is a 500, so you can find the error in the logs if your instance is self-hosted. If your instance is Looker-hosted, you can submit a request to help.looker.com and the Looker Support team can help investigate. Since 500 errors are considered bugs, you can file a bug for the specific error in the logs (not the catch-all error). The Looker Support team can help when filing the bug.SLACK::WEB::API::ERRORS::SLACKERRORIf you see an error like this, the error is coming directly from Slack. You can see what it means in

4610
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why do my queries with table calcs have such a long post-process/unaccounted for time when downloading?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 24, 2020 There could be a few reasons for this, first off table calcs operate over the entire result set. So say one of the calcs makes a list out of the column, that is a 5000 entry list in the simplest case, 50000 in the 20+ minute case. If you then try to take the maxof that, one of these will take much longer. It doesn't have to be a crazy looking table calc to be gnarly in terms of processing time.Second, there is also a global limit of 3 table calcs at a time that one looker instance (or node in a cluster) will process on the backend.  So very long time intervals might include the time queued waiting for one of those table calc worker threads to get free.So what next? The less drastic though less feasible would be to suggest you change there querying habits. Moving table calc logic into the lookml/database OR being wary of how many queries they are firing off/downloading that contain table calcs. The more drastic option but perhaps the more scalable, would be clu

60
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Filtering on Last Business day of MonthKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Feb 2, 2021  dimension: returned_last_business_day {type: yesnosql: CASE WHEN EXTRACT( day from DATEADD(day,2,${returned_date_raw}) ) = 1 AND ${returned_day_of_week} = "Friday"THEN trueWHEN EXTRACT( day from DATEADD(day,3,${returned_date_raw}) ) = 1 AND ${returned_day_of_week} = "Friday" then trueWHEN EXTRACT( day from DATEADD(day,1,${returned_date_raw}) ) = 1 then true else false END;; Basically, what this does is check to see if the second to last day of the month is Friday, if so that means that the last day of the month for that month was Saturday. If the third to last day of the month is Friday, it means that the last day of that month was a Sunday.  This content is subject to limited support.                  

1430
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What does the Ordinal Scale Type visualization setting do?Knowledge Drop

Last tested; Jan 13, 2021 The short explanation is that with Ordinal Scale Type setting, data is plotted along the x-axis as evenly-spaced, discrete entries, regardless of relative distance between data points. (https://docs.looker.com/exploring-data/visualizing-query-results/column-options#scale_type)The longer explanation:Let’s say you have a dataset like the following, where you have a gap in data from December 26th to December 27th (December 25th has data as shown in the data table, it looks empty here because it is a small number for the scale of this visualization).If you would like to show your data over the full timeframe that the data was collected, you can use the “Automatic based on Data” Scale Type (as shown above), or the “Time” Scale Type. However, if you do not want to show this gap, the Ordinal Scale Type will only plot the data from the data table. This content is subject to limited support.                  

800
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Dashboard filter for ${field1} = ${field2}Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 17, 2020 If you don't mind editing the model then here is a solution where setting the filter value to "Yes" will apply the filter rules, and setting it to anything else will just not do any filtering:filter: apply_equality_filter { type: yesno sql: CASE WHEN {% parameter apply_equality_filter %} = true THEN ${field1} = ${field2} ELSE 1=1 END ;;}  This content is subject to limited support.                  

300
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I have a homepage for embedded users?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 24, 2020 Nope. The default homepage is /browse which is not an embeddable page. Feature requests:https://portal.feedback.us.pendo.io/app/#/case/50470what about a custom homepage?Nope. Even if you were to set an embeddable URL for the main homepage or for user-specific homepages via the landing_page attribute, it wouldn't do anything because embed users are not redirected to the homepage upon login—they are redirected to whatever path is specified in your embed URL.In general, you will need to specify where the embed user will land after login in the embed URL itself. This content is subject to limited support.                  

320
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

"I can't see _ from my work computer, but can from my personal computer"Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 24, 2020 If a user is not seeing something in Looker that others are seeing, have them tryan incognito window accessing Looker from a different network other browserIf either of those work, this indicates that the user might have browser extensions (like an ad blocker) or network restrictions that are blocking Looker requests. You can also have them check the JS console for error messages (message are variable but look something like this):Also, clearing cache in browser works if you don't find anything in JS console but still incognito/other browser was working. This content is subject to limited support.                  

100
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Duration type returning imprecise dataKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 24, 2020 Date/time diffs tend to count whole units between timestamps - if a duration type is returning 0s, it could be because every individual duration calculated is less than an hour This content is subject to limited support.                  

100
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What is the difference between history and query create date?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 16, 2020 Query created date is the time that a specific query was first run. The history created date will have a new row every time that query is run.So if you run a specific explore for the first time, the history and query created date will be exactly the same. If you run the same query (same fields, filters, vis config) a couple days later, you'd have another, new history row with a new created date two days later, but the query created date would be the same. This content is subject to limited support.                  

370
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Test user permissions before setting up accountKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Dec 7, 2020While you can't completely set up a user to test without including an email address, you can use a fake email address to test setting up a user - this way you can confirm permissions without giving the user access. This content is subject to limited support.                  

310
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Table calculation for time difference accounting for negativesKnowledge Drop

Last tested: June 15, 2020 The general logic here is, if the time diff is negative, then build own results using diff_minutes/diff_seconds, otherwise; do the calculation.if(${history.created_time}<${history.completed_time},concat("-",ceiling(diff_minutes(${history.created_time},${history.completed_time})/60), ":", abs(mod(diff_seconds(${history.created_time},${history.completed_time}),60))),to_string(${history.completed_time}))  This content is subject to limited support.                  

210
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Error "The resource already exists" while using create_dashboard endpointKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Nov 9, 2020Check if you're passing a slug in to the call - each slug needs to be unique system wide, so that's a possible cause for this error. This content is subject to limited support.                  

440
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Table calculation for time difference accounting for negativesKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 1, 2020 The general logic here is, if the time diff is negative, then build own results using diff_minutes/diff_seconds, otherwise; do the calculation.if(${history.created_time}<${history.completed_time},concat("-",ceiling(diff_minutes(${history.created_time},${history.completed_time})/60), ":", abs(mod(diff_seconds(${history.created_time},${history.completed_time}),60))),to_string(${history.completed_time})) This content is subject to limited support.                  

170
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago

Badges

  • Friendly Face
    sbrylowskihas earned the badge Friendly Face
  • Helpful
    carriehas earned the badge Helpful
  • Community Star
    carriehas earned the badge Community Star
  • Friendly Face
    carriehas earned the badge Friendly Face
  • Community Star
    Dawidhas earned the badge Community Star
Show all badges
Terms of Service