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The Kitchen Table

Explore the product knowledge we've built up together

2113 Topics

jamesnestler
Looker Staff
jamesnestlerLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Python-SDK: Why isn't the returned object in JSON?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 24, 2020 Use file.attribute to access attributes of the object (eg, file.url or file.id).Alternately, use the hidden attribute __dict__ to return the object in json format (eg, file.__dict__ ) This content is subject to limited support.                  

460
jamesnestler
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Blog Archives

The Redshift - SORTKEY and DISTKEY

This content, written by Lloyd Tabb, was initially posted in Looker Blog on Dec 4, 2013. The content is subject to limited support.Indexing in MPP analytical databases (Redshift, Vertica, Greenplum...) works very differently than in traditional transactional databases. Suppose I’m looking to count nursing jobs. I’ve got a list of all job postings in Santa Cruz, and they aren’t ordered in any reasonable way. So I start at the first one, read it, and scan down the list looking for the word “nurse.” It takes a couple of seconds—no problem. Suppose I go regional and I’m looking at the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s 20 times the number of Santa Cruz job postings, and it takes me a few minutes to scan the list and make a count. If I wanted to look at all of California, maybe it would take me an hour. The entire United States—even longer. Now, suppose I want to analyze and compare all of these job postings across the entire United States. I need to scan these lists many times quickly. It’s to

460
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
6 months ago
ruth.mcelroy
Looker Staff
ruth.mcelroyLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

value_format not coming through in exploreKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Dec 9, 2020 The ProblemUser has added value_format to their field which is correct but no changes on the explore sideA SolutionThey most likely have not set the type of their dimension at all or have not set it to be numeric. Make sure they have defined type: number for that field as per our docs;To apply Excel-style formatting to measures via value_format, make sure the measure is numeric and not of type: string.https://docs.looker.com/reference/field-params/value_format This content is subject to limited support.                   

450
ruth.mcelroy
Looker Staff
1 year ago
quinn.morrison
Looker Staff
quinn.morrisonLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is it possible to schedule to S3 using IAM roles instead of access keys?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 6, 2018Currently it is only possible to send to S3 using the access key and secret. There is a feature request to be able to use IAM instance profiles to access S3, please add your +1. This content is subject to limited support.                  

450
quinn.morrison
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is it possible to merge two Looks, instead of two explores?Knowledge Drop

Last Tested: Mar 15, 2021It is not currently possible to merge saved Looks directly, but there is a feature request here which you can vote on. This content is subject to limited support.                 

450
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I customize the title of a dashboard tile?Knowledge Drop

Last Tested: Mar 10, 2021 At the moment, we aren't able to customize the font size, location, and color.You can share with the product team your use case by going to Pendo feedback - once you go into Pendo, search for ID 17627 or click on this link here: https://feedback.us.pendo.io/app/#/case/17627 This content is subject to limited support.                 

450
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Content Validator for Merged ResultsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 9, 2019 To follow along, think of a situation where you have a merged results tile which is named MR Dash. MR Dash merges the results of two explores(For example, Explore1 and Explore2) which currently belong to one model, named ModelA. Unfortunately, if you try to change the model name for Explore2 from the content validator, it ends up changing the model name for both in the case of merged results.Hence, a better way to approach this would be to convert the UDD(User defined dashboard) to a LookML dashboard, make the required changes, and then convert it back to a UDD.The steps we followed were as follows:From your dashboard tile MR Dash, retrieve the dashboard LookML. To do so, you can reference this link - https://docs.looker.com/dashboards/creating-lookml-dashboards#manually_building_or_modifying_a_lookml_dashboard Within this dashboard LookML snippet, for explore: explore2, change the model name to ModelB, and keep the model name for Explore1 as ModelA. Save this

450
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
mandy.chan
Looker Staff
mandy.chanLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Orphan Groups in LDAP settingsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 15, 2020 If you have LDAP set up and then delete your old LDAP/AD groups in your IdP, you will still see the old group listed in the Groups page. For example, Viewing Testing (Orphan 123456789) GroupIt should be handled in the same way as SAML shadow groups, where the shadow groups will still appear until users from the old group re-logs in and gets mapped to the new group, or 30 days have passed. This content is subject to limited support.                  

450
mandy.chan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
chris.seymour
Looker Staff
chris.seymourLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I host a custom visualization on a private github repo?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 28, 2020 Not if you want it to work consistently! Users who are signed into Github and have access to the private repo will be able to see the custom vis, but if they are not signed in to Github, the custom visualization will not work, and Looker will not tell them why. Furthermore, PDF and PNG downloads of the custom visualization will also fail, since Looker will not sign into your Github account to generate the file. More detail:At the time a browser is loading a Looker dashboard page, it will make network requests to fetch the custom visualization javascript source. You will need to host those files somewhere that can be reached by any browser that can load your dashboard, including the “Headless” browser that Looker uses internally to generate PDFs and PNGs. Since there’s no way to guarantee that everyone who visits your dashboard is already signed-in to github with access to the private repo, you will probably need to “publish” the custom visualization source cod

450
chris.seymour
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Blog Archives

What’s new in Looker? Features & updates - April 2020 edition

This content, written by Jill Hardy, was initially posted in Looker Blog on Apr 8, 2020. The content is subject to limited support.Welcome to our April 2020 edition of “What’s New in Looker?” Get ready to discover actions you can perform in Looker that you might not have known about. This post focuses on new product features of dashboards, Looks, and Explores (and leaves the coding to the developers.) Important: If you create or maintain dashboards, pay special attention because this post is for you. Today we’ll cover the new Looker dashboards. These dashboards didn’t just receive a makeover: they’ve also got an exciting new set of filter options that make them easier to use... when you do them right. You’ll learn how below. But first, let’s check out the new look. Sleek look and feel Automatic margins between tiles, white (not gray) space, and an updated “Refresh Data” button make your new dashboards feel fresh and modern. Notice the differences: A dashboard in the original Looker sty

450
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
6 months ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Do the per-user-query-limit and thread pool limit increase in a cluster?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 15, 2020Yes! These are per-node limits. This content is subject to limited support.                  

450
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
V
Looker Staff
vitor.leepkalnLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

My date filter is returning results from one day laterKnowledge Drop

Last tested: May 24, 2019 ProblemWhile filtering on a specific date, or by last x days, the query returns results from one day later.Potential SolutionsIf it's only a date (YYYY-MM-DD), with no time info, make sure your dimension_group contains a datatype: date parameter. Check to make sure that timezone conversion is happening or not happening as expecting.   This content is subject to limited support.                    

450
V
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Best practice for handling group ids over multiple instancesKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 13, 2020 Say you have staging/dev/production instances and your group ids are different per instance.The recommendation is to keep the names the same, then1. run api call on group name to get group id, save as variable2. add the group id variable to the sso embed urlNo magic there. best you can do is query for all_groups then pick them out by name. or the app code could keep a mapping somewhere of all the names => id for every environment, so you don't have to keep looking it up This content is subject to limited support.                  

450
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
sam
Looker Staff
samLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why can't I see my Slack channel in the Looker sending modal?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: April 2021  When you don't see the desired channel in the Looker sending modal:a) If you're using the Lookerbot, you have to invite it to your channel first (On your channel, "Add people to #channel_name", find the Lookerbot the same way you find individual users, and select), orb) if you're using a legacy token, you should see the Looker app under "Apps" on Slack and will have to invite the app to your channel ("Add Apps" on your channel and find the Looker app),then you should see that channel in the modal upon refresh.When Lookerbot isn't showing up in your Slack channel:Step a) from above.Further reading: Using Lookerbot for Slack This content is subject to limited support.                

450
sam
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Performance Diagnosis: Network UnreliabilityKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Nov 2, 2018 In order to use Looker, end users need to make requests from their client browser to the Looker server. The Looker server usually lives on another machine than the one end users are requesting from, so these requests need to traverse a network (or networks).A network is a collection of connected machines capable of transmitting data amongst themselves. If a network has a route to another network by means of a router and routing table, machines in one network can transmit data to and from machines in another network. The internet is just a massive conglomeration of networks.If I'm at work within my office's network and I'm requesting resources from a Looker server hosted in Looker's VPC, I'm traversing multiple networks. In other words, the packets transmitted to and from our respective machines need to jump through multiple networks on their journey. When troubleshooting network unreliability, it's usually helpful to determine:what network devices are between t

450
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Eric_Lyons
Looker Staff
Eric_LyonsLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What does Daemonize mean in the Looker ARGS?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 15, 2020  example flag --no-daemonize  TLDR: daemonize runs programs in the background.If you add the --no-daemonize flag, Looker will stop when the user kills the terminal session on the instance.daemonize runs a command as a Unix daemon. As defined in W. Richard Stevens’ 1990 book, UNIX Network Programming (Addison-Wesley, 1990), a daemon is “a process that executes ‘in the background’ (i.e., without an associated terminal or login shell) either waiting for some event to occur, or waiting to perform some specified task on a periodic basis.”Source This content is subject to limited support.                   

440
Eric_Lyons
Looker Staff
1 year ago
sam
Looker Staff
samLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is it possible to parameterize the "from" address for a scheduled email?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Mar 16, 2018 No. It is not possible to change the sender of scheduled emails for default SMTP.The only thing that controls the "from" address in Looker is the SMTP server. So, you would need to setup a custom SMTP, to have whatever address you like. This content is subject to limited support.                  

440
sam
Looker Staff
1 year ago
quinn.morrison
Looker Staff
quinn.morrisonLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

"Variable not found" when dynamically querying derived tables using parametersKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Nov 26, 2020 Are you using the method outlined in Dynamically Query Tables Using Parameters with derived tables and hitting a pesky "Variable not found" error message in the LookML Validator?While derived tables in the format ${derived_table_or_view_name.SQL_TABLE_NAME} don't need to be joined (see If you reference a derived table in the SQL of another derived table, using ${viewname.SQL_TABLE_NAME}, do you have to join those views at the explore level?), they need to be joined if we're using a parameter. This is because the views must be joined in order to "listen" to the parameter.Example:view: selected_table {sql_table_name:{% if timeframe_selection._parameter_value == 'weekly' %}${weekly_view.SQL_TABLE_NAME}{% elsif timeframe_selection._parameter_value == 'daily' %}${daily_view.SQL_TABLE_NAME}{ % else % }${full_view.SQL_TABLE_NAME}{ % endif % } ;;parameter: timeframe_selection {type: unquotedallowed_value: {label: "Weekly"value: "weekly"}allowed_value: {label: "Daily"v

440
quinn.morrison
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why are my email fields grey?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 10, 2018 There are two different interpretations of this question, with two different answers.1. On the Admin > User page, before editing a user. If an email is grey here, it means the user can't log in with these credentials. In this example, SAML is enabled for the instance. User 538 is an Admin and thus is allowed to log in with Alternate Login using their email address. User 587, on the other hand, doesn't have the login_special_email permission and is not an admin, so they cannot use their email address to log in, only SAML.Two: On the Edit User page.This means that the email can't be edited from here. When using SAML or another identity provider (IdP), Looker gets the email address from that IdP. You can't edit the email in Looker, because it will get overridden the next time someone logs in with SAML. This content is subject to limited support.                  

440
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I remove LookML elements like `case` in an extending view?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Mar 15, 2021 No. You can only add new LookML elements in an extending view but you cannot remove existing onesFor example, if we ave the following in our original/extended view:dimension: case_when_test {type: stringcase: {when: {sql: ${TABLE}.genre = "Drama" ;;label: "Case1"}when: {sql: ${TABLE}.genre = "Comedy" ;;label: "Case2"}when: {sql: ${TABLE}.genre = "Action" ;;label: "Case3"}else: "Other"}} And attempt the following in order to reduce the number of the LookML case whens in the extending view, this is not going to work - the dimension is still going to have all the case whens from the original view.dimension: case_when_test { type: string case: { when: { sql: ${TABLE}.genre = "Drama" ;; label: "Case1" } else: "Other" } } As a workaround, we would want to use SQL CASE WHEN in the sql parameter in both the original view and the extending view. This content is subject to limited support.                   

440
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Lan
Community Admin
LanCommunity Admin
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Where do we save Look and Dashboard inside the server?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 25, 2020Looker objects (view file, model file, LookML dashboard files, etc) are inside each model’s project in the server. For Looks and User-Defined Dashboard (UDD), Looker saves the metadata in the internal database, and then we display them in the front end. You can use System Activity to query information from the internal database. This content is subject to limited support.                  

440
Lan
Community Admin
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why is my custom map layer not loading in public embed?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Nov 18, 2020 Firstly, if we open up the network tab do we see a 3xx redirect when trying to load the topojson file? And does that redirect back to /login?If so next we will want to check if while logged in to Looker in the same browser session does the public look load without issue? Though public looks are meant to be as it states, public, if we are using a custom map layer that is defined in Looker (ie. only accessible from within Looker) then the only way to fetch it is by having an authenticated browser session already open.Next steps, host the json file literally anywhere else (github, etc.) somewhere that is publicly accessible. Point the map layer to the url path of that file and boom, should load without issue! This content is subject to limited support.                  

440
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
sam
Looker Staff
samLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I filter on a list of numbers in user attributes?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 2020 Yes, you need to use the “number advanced” filter rather than simple number filter. Then you can enter a comma separated list of numbers like you would in a matches (advanced) filter with a Looker filter expression. This content is subject to limited support.                

440
sam
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
adina.katzLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I use prefix unicode/ prefix N notation in Looker?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 3, 2019 You can use prefix N notation in the sql parameter of a dimension or other sql_* parameter types however this could lead to issues with filtering on the dimension.For example, if you have a dimensions with sql: N'Hello' ;; and then filter on that dimension in an explore for is equal to 'Hello', Looker will not generate N'Hello' in the WHERE clause so you will see no results in some cases, depending on the database settings.The better thing to do in this case is to configure the SQL server with a Collation that supports the desired string literals, and then never use the N'' prefix. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/collations/collation-and-unicode-support?view=sql-server-2017 This content is subject to limited support.                 

440
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Eric_Lyons
Looker Staff
Eric_LyonsLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Send Look to SFTP Server Via Python SDKKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 18, 2020 If someone wants to send content to an SFTP server, but does not want to want to use the UI, they can use the API.import looker_sdkimport csvimport pysftp#SET SFTP CREDENTIALS HERE. IT IS RECOMMENDED TO SET THEM IN ANOTHER FILE AND IMPORT THEM SECURELYmyHostname = "DOMAIN"myUsername = "user"myPassword = "PASSWORD" ####Initialize API/SDK for more info go here: https://pypi.org/project/looker-sdk/#### IN THE SAME DIRECTORY CREATE AN INI FILE TO STORE API CREDENTIALS## INITIALIZE THE APIfrom looker_sdk import methods31, modelssdk = looker_sdk.init31() # or init40() for v4.0 APIme = sdk.me()### GET THE LOOK BY PASSING THE LOOK ID### WE ALSO WRITE THE FILE TO THE LOCAL DIRECTORY AS A CSVlook = sdk.run_look(look_id=12, result_format = "csv")file = open('read.csv', 'w') file.write(look)file.close() ### HERE WE SEND THE CSV TO THE SFTP SERVERwith pysftp.Connection(host=myHostname, username=myUsername, password=myPassword) as sftp:print("Connection succesfully stablish

440
Eric_Lyons
Looker Staff
1 year ago

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