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The Kitchen Table

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2113 Topics

mandy.chan
Looker Staff
mandy.chanLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

"no such explore" errorKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Dec 1, 2020 If you're seeing a "no such explore" <explore name> error, this usually occurs because we're referencing an Explore in a file, but haven't included it.For instance, if we're creating a NDT, we'll need to use explore_source to base the NDT off of an Explore, and include the file containing the Explore definition. This content is subject to limited support.                   

540
mandy.chan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What is the difference between SSO embed and SSO authentication?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 3, 2018 SSO stands for single sign-on and refers to a wide variety of techniques for avoiding having a user login multiple times.SSO embedding embeds reports into a website from Looker, and SSO authentication allows you to use one account to log in to other services.SSO embedding involves the generation of a URL that authenticates the user as a new or returning Looker user, defining all of the permissions and roles, and then displaying the desired content or data to the end user in an iframe.SSO authentication refers to being able to sign on to multiple services with one login, the way that many services allow you to sign on using your Google or Facebook account. This content is subject to limited support.                   

1090
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
mandy.chan
Looker Staff
mandy.chanLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

`Create cancelled error` in PDT Log ActionKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 7, 2020 The Create cancelled error in the PDT Log Action field means that the query used to create the derived table was killed by the database for a variety of reasons. Here are some possibilities:The query was canceled by the user There was a time out on the database side There was an error in the SQL while trying to create the PDT This content is subject to limited support.                 

830
mandy.chan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What can cause the signature to not authenticate in an SSO embed URI?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 19, 2020 If the signature is not authenticating, you will know by this error message:'signature' param failed to authenticateLikely CausesThe SSO secret in the Looker instance and the SSO secret in the SSO embed script are not the same. The signature portion of the embed parameters are being concatenated in the wrong order in the URL generation script (proper order is doc'd here) There is a line break in one of the parameters that makes up the URL, which can be missed after encoding The script is modifying the signature after generating it, or failing to encode it properly (compare against our script examples).For steps to troubleshoot, check this article. This content is subject to limited support.                  

1160
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I put a subquery in a dimension?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 29, 2019 Yes. A query in a dimension is called a correlated sub-query.If the sub-query is based (FROM) on an UNNEST of an array. It is a great thing to do (BigQuery, Snowflake and Postgres all support this).If the sub-query is based (FROM) on another table it is discouraged.Why is it discouraged?Because it is not performant. It's generally a bad idea to create a subquery in a dimension because that subquery will be rerun for every row being calculated. The recommendation is to use a derived table instead so that the subquery would only be run once.OK, but it is possible?In most databases, it's possible. The problem most users run into is that subqueries return multiple rows but every SELECT clause element only expects a single row. So if you add LIMIT 1 to your subquery, it will usually work.Of course, this often defeats the purpose of your subquery, in which case you will want to create a derived table which has the subquery inside and join the derived table view back

13400
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can we parameterize a connection and still use PDTs?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 16, 2019 Chat tip: as of 5.12 you can have parameterized connections with PDTs, as long as you use the PDT Override feature and you're parameterizing via user attributes.In Looker 5.12 we gave the ability to have a special PDT database user that is different from the Looker database user. The PDT user would have different database credentials, and would thus not be affected by parameterized connections.More on this feature in docs.Note: BigQuery's "Max Billing Gigabytes" can be set to a User Attribute and Persistent Derived Tables can still be used without the PDT Override feature This content is subject to limited support.                   

720
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Where should the embed_domain parameter be defined when SSO embedding?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 30, 2020 The embed_domain parameter isn't its own SSO parameter, but rather gets put directly in the embed_url parameter. If the embed_domain is specified as a separate query parameter, even if it is placed after the embed_url, users may get the error: "Embed URI is not valid: This request includes invalid params: [“embed_domain”]. The script will not format the embed_domain correctly to generate the signature unless it is actually part of the embed_url.If you are troubleshooting this error, first ask yourself, "Do I actually need to include the embed_domain?" The embed_domain parameter is only necessary if your script is using Javascript event listeners (not a requirement for a basic SSO embed implementation). So if you do not need to listen for Javascript events, the simplest option is to get rid of the embed_domain completely.If you do want to listen for Javascript events, you'll want to check the URL generation script to see where the embed_domain is being added. H

3940
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Looker startup scriptsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 21, 2019 The Looker start up scripts are kept on Github.Contents:Contains up-to-date scripts for starting and stopping Looker. Check here often for updates. Update these scripts on your machine whenever you update your Looker release. This content is subject to limited support.                  

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maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is it possible to completely set up a Looker user via the API?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 18, 2017 Creating a user with any kind of credential can be done in Looker, but there is usually another step that has to be done manually to get the user logged in and ready to go.For example, to create a user with email credentials requires 2 api calls: create_user + create_user_credentials_email.After this is done, the user account will have an email address associated with it, but the user account will not be active because it does not have a password associated with it.You will need to call create_user_credentials_email_password_reset(user.id) to generate a password reset url, and then you will need to send that password reset url to the end user (perhaps via email) and instruct them to click the link to set their password securely on first login. The Looker API does not send that email.Also, for brand new users, who are setting up their accounts for the first time, check out the last point at the end!EXAMPLE CURLPOST to create new user:curl -X POST \  https://you

4890
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is there a limit to the number of API requests you can send at one time?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 7, 2019 We only rate limit endpoints whose functionality could be abused (deliberately or accidentally) to send spam or to execute a denial of service attack on a third party. For example, the scheduled_plan_run_once endpoint is rate limited to 10 calls per second.  If your app runs into this limit, you'll get an HTTP status of 429 in the response. All you need to do to avoid this is to have your script take a nap between calls to the scheduled_plan_run_once API. A sleep() or delay() of half a second (500 milliseconds) between calls would be ample.There are some peculiarities with rate limiting in a clustered environment. The rate limit trap may not fire exactly at the prescribed limit, but be a little more lax in a cluster than on a single instance.  The rate limit doesn't need to be exact, it's only there to prevent malicious abuse of the system.Additionally, every node has a hard coded active thread limit of 200, and it is possible to overwhelm an instance or even a

9400
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What is the difference between --unlimited-scheduler-threads, --scheduler-threads, and --scheduler-query-limit?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 31, 2020 --scheduler-threads limits the number of schedules that are being executed at once by the machine.Please be cautious when increasing the number of scheduler threads as this could lead to performance issues, especially if you are scheduling rendering jobs.One Look and one Dashboard both count as a single scheduler thread.--unlimited-scheduler-threads does the same thing, except that this limit applies to schedules which return all results.--scheduler-query-limit only applies to the individual queries of each schedule.One Look is always one query, but each tile on a dashboard is its own query. So this startup flag controls how many of these queries can be running at once on the instance.cite startup options (docs) This content is subject to limited support.                  

980
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What is an iframe (SSO embed)?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 3, 2018 An iframe is an HTML element wherein you can render an entirely different HTML document, potentially from an entirely different server. It's basically HTML inception. "iframe" is short for "inline frame"; it isn't an Apple product so I see no reason why you would capitalize the 'F'. And as you'd suspect, there is a non-inline <frame>element, but it's been deprecated with HTML5.An iframe takes the following form:<iframe attr1="val1" attr2="val2" ... attrN="valN"></iframe>...where each attr is one of the following:Attribute Value Description height pixels Specifies the height name text Specifies the name sandbox allow-forms, allow-pointer-lock, allow-popups, allow-same-origin, allow-scripts, allow-top-navigation Enables an extra set of restrictions for the content src url Specifies the address of the document to embed srcdoc html code Specifies the HTML content of the page to show, as an alternative to src width p

1540
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What happens to SAML users if you disable SAML authentication?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 21, 2019 If you disable SAML authentication, then all users who rely on SAML authentication will be locked out of the application. They won't be kicked out until their session expires, though.This is based on SAML Docs:Don't disable SAML authentication while you are logged into Looker via SAML unless you have an alternate account login set up. You could lock yourself out of the app.However, any user with other login credentials (email/LDAP/Google) will still be able to log in using those authentication methods. This content is subject to limited support.                  

520
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
maxcorbinLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

URI (Universal Resource Identifier) for Looker embedKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 3, 2018 A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a string of characters used to identify a resource within a network of computers, such as the World Wide Web. A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a kind of URI that also implies the means for retrieving the referenced resource.A URI takes the following generalized form:scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment]You can read more about the components of the generalized form here, but for Looker URLs we can pare this down to something more specific:scheme://host[:port]/path[?query]If your path or query strings contain special characters like '/' or '?', you'll need to percent-encode them so that they won't be confused with URI syntax elements. For example, '/' turns into '%2F' and '?' turns into '%3F'. You can easily encode and decode URLs with simple online tools, like this one. This content is subject to limited support.                   

200
maxcorbin
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How can I quickly test dev mode PDTs without generating the entire PDT?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 27, 2019 Working Faster in Development Mode (Docs)There are cases when the PDT you're creating may take a long time to generate, which can be frustrating when testing lots of changes in development mode. Looker supports a conditional WHERE clause for development mode that helps manage this:view: my_view {derived_table: {sql:SELECT columnsFROMmy_tableWHERE-- if prod -- date > '2000-01-01'-- if dev -- date > '2015-01-01';;}} Note: if no filtering is wanted in prod, you can do -- if prod -- 1=1, or you can put the WHERE inside the --if dev. Link to full PDT Documentation (Docs). This content is subject to limited support.                 

1350
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

FAQ: "Rebuild Derived Tables and Run" with PDTsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Dec 27, 2018 What is it?The "Rebuild Derived Tables and Run" button will initiate a rebuild of all persistent derived tables involved in the query. It will also initiate a rebuild of all upstream PDTs. When can you see this option?The "Rebuild Derived Tables and Run" button will appear in the cog of an explore or look if:The user has the "develop" permission (as of 4.18) The query uses a PDT that has already been built. The query has finished running. Note: The option will not appear in an Embedded context (with /embed/ in the URL) - public or private, regardless of permissions Another note: not available on dashboardsDoes it affect other users?Sort of. Only the user that clicked the button will have to wait for the rebuild to finish. All other users use the existing table. However, all users will use the new version of the table once it is complete. Other users may also be impacted by the database strain that the rebuild may cause. If you hit this button while in dev mode

5910
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
milli.koch
Looker Staff
milli.kochLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Liquid workaround for creating OR logic in front end filtersKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Nov 19, 2019 The ProblemYou want to allow their users to implement OR logic between two separate filters (e.g. Age >= 25 OR State="New York") but this is not possible using Looker's default filter options. Usually we'll recommend using custom filters to get around this however these are not available on dashboards and are not always business user friendly.A SolutionWe can use templated filters and liquid parameters in a sql_always_where parameter on the Explore to get around these limitations. This will ask a bit more of developers but will ultimately allow them to provide a better solution for their front-end users.Create filter-only fields for the fields that you want users to be able filter with OR logic.filter: state_filter {type: stringsuggest_dimension: state} filter: age_filter {type: number}Create a liquid parameter to allow users to input the filter logic of choice.parameter: filter_logic {type: unquotedallowed_value: {label: "OR"value: "OR"} allowed_value: {la

1970
milli.koch
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can you use CTEs (WITH syntax) in a PDT? (common table expressions, aka WITH param)Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 1, 2020 You can use CTEs in PDTs, and you can use them in DTs. However, it’s not recommended to use CTEs in PDTs or DTs. Using a CTE can work…but it can also break, and we don’t know when it will nor do we test for it.Ephemeral Derived Tables are created using a WITH statement. Therefore, using a CTE in a DT would create nested WITH statements, which is not allowed in SQL. You may see an error like Syntax error at or near WITHRecommended Fix: take the sql from your CTE and use that in a derived table, then reference that back in the PDT/DT that you are pulling the CTE out ofview: cte_replacement {derived_table: {sql: SELECT id FROM analyst ;;}} view: users_b {derived_table: {sql: SELECT * FROM ${cte_replacement.SQL_TABLE_NAME} ;;}}  This content is subject to limited support.                   

13960
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Does the scheduler listen to cache?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 22, 2017 Yes, a scheduled query will behave the same way as a normal query.In addition, a schedule may use the render cache. This content is subject to limited support.                   

190
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is there a way to see unused fields, explores, views, etc?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 21, 2019 You can currently do this with the API, or use the Henry tool for instance cleanup!Note that Henry is an open source tool, and therefore not supported by Looker’s normal support channels. This content is subject to limited support.                 

4220
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What are Query Slugs?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Mar 26, 2020 We currently have 3 kinds of queries: Normal Queries, SQL Runner Queries, and Merge Queries. Information about each resides in its own table in the internal database (normal queries in the query table, sql runner queries in the sql_query table, merge queries in merge_query ). So query id 8 is unrelated to sql query id 8.A query slug is like a string ID. The thing that makes them great is that they are unique across all tables in the database. So if you give me a query slug, I can tell you what kind of query it is.Query slugs looks like this: drhGIqAK7qSRksKg6Y3UWs and are often found at the end of explore URLs.  This content is subject to limited support.                  

7420
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is there a way to remove Looker links from scheduled emails?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 21, 2017 Per-ScheduleIn Looker 4.20+, there is an option in the scheduler modal to "Include Links" for each scheduled report.Instance-wideThere is also a Whitelabel section of the Admin page where you can turn this off globally.Note: This requires the Whitelabel license feature to be turned on, contact your Looker account manager if you want to make use of this feature.  This content is subject to limited support.                   

480
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Putting a Dashboard or Look on a TV , Raspberry Pi, Airtame, Display, BroadcastKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Mar 22, 2021 You can only put a dashboard on a TV if the streaming service you use will allow you to log in to Looker. This isn't possible with a Raspberry Pi or Airtame since they only take a web address and don't let you navigate or use any input.The options here are public look or SSO embed.As of Looker 6.24, content can be made public but restricted by IP address - so a public look could be made accessible to the Raspberry Pi's IP address and prohibited for all others.If you are using SSO embed, you can also just have the raspberry Pi web server generate an SSO Url with a particular embed user configuration and you can display a dashboard. You may want to refresh the Looker content you want to display on the TV screen periodically (dashboard refresh?). It's recommended that the Raspberry Pi device generate a new SSO URl periodically as well, perhaps daily. This content is subject to limited support.                    

3070
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What changes will break a look?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 1, 2018 The long url of a look is of the form:http://instance.looker.com/explore/MODEL_NAME/EXPLORE_NAME?fields=...filter_config=... This means a look will break or change in the following situations:-model is changed or deleted such that MODEL NAME is no longer valid-explore is changed, moved or deleted such that EXPLORE NAME is no longer valid-field is changed or deleted such that a field name is no longer valid.This means you can move a model to a new project, for example, and the look will not break as long as the explore and model have the same name. This content is subject to limited support.                   

40
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Morgan
Looker Staff
MorganLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

When does a PDT make upstream (dependent) PDTs get rebuiltKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 16, 2019 Hitting the "rebuild derived tables and run" button will rebuild the current PDTs and any upstream PDTs.A trigger will not cause upstream PDTs to rebuild, unless those PDTs don't exist This content is subject to limited support.                  

90
Morgan
Looker Staff
1 year ago

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