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The Kitchen Table

Explore the product knowledge we've built up together

2111 Topics

Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Which table does cached results get stored in the internal database?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 14, 2020 Where can I find my cached results?Within every Looker directory there's a /looker/.cache directory which is where cached objects is actually stored (query results, internal objects, etc.) Check out this ​post to read more about this.The internal database will have a cache_index table that will have metadata that points to each entry within the /looker/.cache directory. If something is stored on disk, then it'll have an entry in the cache_index internal db table.Within this cache_index table, there's also a corresponding TTL (time to live) which will specify how long the objects are stored in cache.The contents within the /looker/cache directory are all encrypted via 256 bit encryption This content is subject to limited support.                  

850
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Will a user in multiple [SAML/LDAP] Groups Get Associated to Multiple Looker Roles?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 18, 2019 They definitely should. If it's not coming through, check the tests in the setup page.This can occur due to a messed up base_dn. This content is subject to limited support.                  

260
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I parameterize the scheduled email subject line?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 21, 2019 No, at this time you can only write a static string as the email subject. There is no way to have a dynamic field like a date in there.However, there is a feature request. This content is subject to limited support.                   

360
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Where do I get LOOKER_WEBHOOK_TOKEN for lookerbot?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 21, 2019 The lookerbot setup instructions mentions a webhook token. You can find this at the bottom of the admin panel in your Looker instance. This content is subject to limited support.                  

310
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

My custom TopoJSON is freezing my browser! What do I do?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 13, 2020Check the filesize of the TopoJSON. We recommend a 2MB or less file. Sites like mapshaper.org can help with cutting filesize, by reducing the number of shapes. This content is subject to limited support.                  

150
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

CSV to SQL ToolKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 13, 2020 The ProblemYou have a CSV and you want to explore it in Looker. You know you're supposed to use a database, but it's just this one CSV...WorkaroundThis web based tool quickly generates a SQL UNION (ALL) query & LookML from a raw csv snippet.This tool is not supported by Looker. This content is subject to limited support.                  

3580
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

My LookML files are disappearing and reappearing in Production mode!Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 27, 2020 If files are disappearing and reappearing, make sure that nobody's pushing changes from dev mode.This is not something Looker does- if you're hosting your own instance, check to see if there is some process which is messing with the file system running in your environment. This content is subject to limited support.                  

240
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I log in to Looker with two separate email addresses but keep the same user?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 31, 2018 Generally speaking, no. Each Looker user is only allowed one set of credentials for each type. So, you can't connect two email/password combos (or two LDAP logins, SAML logins, etc) to one Looker user.There is a workaround of sorts that takes advantage of Looker's Alternate Login method. The email address associated with your LDAP account, for example, could differ from the email address you use for Alternate Login. This content is subject to limited support.                  

580
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Does Looker use tokens for SAML?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 18, 2019 Looker doesn't use tokens at all when authenticating with SAML.In fact, we are 100% decoupled from Okta’s notion of sessions and how they keep users logged in or not.When a user hits the ‘Authenticate’ button, we redirect the user’s browser to the SAML IdP and (implicitly) say “the user using this browser wants to log in, let me know if this is someone you trust and please give me info about them”. The IdP eventually redirects the user’s browser back to us with a signed SAML doc (or not if the IdP doesn’t trust this user). We verify the doc and then extract the info about the user that we care about (email, name, groups, etc).We then forget about that SAML doc. There is no token-like thing we retain from that doc (other than the stable user id). We then maintain our own sessions and cookies to authenticate each request from a logged-in user as they use looker. But, that is all completely decoupled from any tokens or the like from the SAML IdP. This content is

370
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I use a user ID other than email for logging in to Looker?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 1, 2019 No, the only user ID you can use in Looker is an email. Logging in will always require an email/password combo.If you want to customize your login experience, consider integrating with LDAP or SAML. This content is subject to limited support.                  

140
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why aren't logs being written?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 23, 2018 When Looker is no longer writing logs, a restart will get the process going again.This can happen if you do anything to the looker.log file, such as:edit looker.log from vi or another text editor delete looker.log move or rename looker.log ziplooker.logTDLR: Always make a copy of looker.log before doing anything. This content is subject to limited support.                  

100
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is there a Liquid parameter for the current Looker instance hostname URL?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 29, 2020 There is not. This is a feature request: Grab current page URL with liquid.WorkaroundIf you have several different instances but just wants to use a single liquid variable, then you can achieve this with a clever application of User Attributes.On each instance, create a User Attribute called "hostname". Set the default value of "hostname" to the hostname URL. This will differ per instance, of course. In your LookML, reference {{ _user_attributes['hostname'] }} to get the hostname URL! This content is subject to limited support.                  

1790
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do we fix a blank timezone in Looker-generated SQL?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 11, 2020 There is a known issue where disabling user-specific timezones can cause this to a Look that was created when user-specific timezones were enabled.Either enabling user specific timezones or creating the look from scratch with user-specific timezones off should solve the problem. This content is subject to limited support.                  

150
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why am I getting `Uh Oh. GATEWAY_TIMEOUT` when downloading a dashboard PDF?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 4, 2018 This error implies a network timeout. Check for a load balancer on your end. On Looker nginx servers sample we use a timeout of 3600 seconds, which can be customisable to your environment. This content is subject to limited support.                  

170
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What is LEXP?Knowledge Drop

Last tested; Jun 4, 2021 LEXP stands for Looker Expressions. It is a special syntax created by Looker that is used for Table Calculations, Custom Fields, and Custom Filters. We have a doc that outlines the general usage of expressions, and another doc that has a list of all functions that it currently supports.Why do I need to know this?The value here is to know that the overlap exists between Table Calculations, Custom Fields, and Custom Filters. Not all functions are available in all 3 locations, but many are.For example, once you learn a new Table Calc, you can most likely apply it to a Custom Filter or Custom Field as well! For example, if you encounter an issue in Custom Fields, then you should consider that the bug may affect Table Calculations as well! This content is subject to limited support.                  

610
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

month_x timeframeKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Feb 3, 2019 This came from a custom month_18 (group by every 1.5 years) timeframe in redshift. Here is a generalized version for month_x where you can shift the start month by adjusting y: dimension: month_x { type: string sql: TO_CHAR(DATE_TRUNC('month', #Convert the result to an appropriate string DATEADD('month', # Going to add months at the end (DATE_PART(month,CONVERT_TIMEZONE('UTC', 'America/Los_Angeles', ${created_raw} ))::integer + #These two lines calculate the number of months from 0000-01-01 to created_raw DATE_PART(year, CONVERT_TIMEZONE('UTC', 'America/Los_Angeles', ${created_raw} ))::integer*12) - (DATE_PART(month,CONVERT_TIMEZONE('UTC', 'America/Los_Angeles', ${created_raw} ))::integer -1+y+ #these two lines use Modulo X to subtract off the appropriate number of months to group by x (and shift by y) DATE_PART(year, CONVERT_TIMEZONE('UTC', 'America/Los_Angele

320
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How does one resolve an issue with setting up the shared filesystem where the uid and gid are different on the share than they are on the looker server?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 21, 2020 The UID and GUID need to match.As root, you can edit /etc/passwd and /etc/group on one host to make it match the other, then do a chown -R looker:looker /path/to/shared/whatever This content is subject to limited support.                  

70
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
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.                  

390
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is model localization also applied to UDD?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Feb 12, 2021 When we apply localization on the model level, some elements would be localized on explores, looks and user defined dashboards, as for example labels, group labels and descriptions and even data values. Take a look on the docs for more elements that can be localized on the model level.Some dashboards elements can't be localized on user defined dashboards as for instance, dashboard and tiles titles, text tiles, notes.See the example below, where we are applying localization on the model level:pt_BR.string.json{"gender": "Genero","f": "Feminino","m": "Masculino","users": "usuarios","count" : "Total","Male vs Female" : "Masculino vs Feminino" ,"Count of Gender Dashboard" : "Dashboard Total de Genero"} users.viewHere I am using liquid to apply the localization on the data level. view: users{label: "users"measure: count {label: "count"type: countdrill_fields: [id]}dimension: gender {label: "gender"type: stringsql: CASEWHEN ${TABLE}.gender = "f" THEN "{{ _localizati

360
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Access to font at ' S3 bucket' from origin 'https://ait.dev.att.com' has been blocked by the CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resourceKnowledge Drop

Last tested: May 20, 2020 If you are seeing this error on your JS console for your embed contentThe solution is to set on the S3 bucket settings: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/cors.html the configurations to accept it.We've had users that confirmed it worked after enabling the AccessHeader to include everything * instead of Authorization and removing the <ExposeHeader>Access-Control-Allow-Origin</ExposeHeader>Note that it might take a while to see the changes as things might get cached in the browser This content is subject to limited support.                  

640
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
Department of Customer LoveModerator
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to apply access_filters to viewsKnowledge Drop

Last tested: May 6, 2020 The ProblemI have an access_filter for one of my explores. But I'd like to use it for a view instead so that it will automatically come through for all explores which use this view.A WorkaroundWe can replicate the functionality of access filters in views by referencing the user attribute in the WHERE clause of the sql_table_name or derived table sql parameter.Assume we have the following explore-level access filter that we want to replicate:explore: customer {access_filter: {field: customer.nameuser_attribute: allowed_customers}} 2. If the view is not a derived table, we can add a WHERE clause to the sql_table_name parameter like so:view: customers {# old version# sql_table_name: public.customers;;# new version with added WHERE clausesql_table_name: (SELECT * FROM public.usersWHERE customer.name = {{ _user_attributes['allowed_customers']}}) ;;} Q: This works, but what if I have multiple values inside that user attribute? Can I dynamically change between '=' and

2270
Department of Customer Love
Moderator
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

400 Bad Request when downloading dashboard zip csvKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Mar 31, 2020 Pre 7.2: if a query fails to run for any reason (a DB error, a problem with table calc syntax, etc.), the cache will not be set but the invalid cache entry will still be retrieved, throwing an Error streaming dashboard-my_dashboard/my_tile.csv to out error. Version 7.2+: Thanks to the amazing Ryan Dunlavy, the underlying query error is now reported when scheduling zips of dashboards, so the workaround here is to send a test of a schedule of the zip to see the query error. From there you can find the tile with the error to fix.Version 7.18+: The underlying query error is now also surfaced when downloading zips of dashboards.However, even now that the underlying query error is surfaced, these error messages can still be difficult to interpret:You can Explore from Here on the dashboard tile named in the error message to see what is causing the download to fail. Possible causes: missing values were not filled, error in table calc formula, etc. This content is subj

2430
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
molly.lippsettLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Get changes back after revert to productionKnowledge Drop

Last tested; Jul 7, 2020 Say you accidentally push some changes to production - your coworker reverts those changes, so production is all set, but you wanted some of those changes to continue working on. How can you get them back?In History, from either the git menu in Looker or in the remote provider, you can see which changes were pushed in the last deploy that got reverted. In Github specifically, you can go back to each commit and download files from that point in history. Find the files that had the changes that were accidentally pushed, download them, and then you can drag the files back into the Looker IDE in dev mode to get the changes back. This content is subject to limited support.                  

1060
molly.lippsett
Looker Staff
1 year ago
V
Looker Staff
vishal.dharmadhikariLooker Staff
asked in Technical Tips & Tricks

Render job error: `query failed: Transaction was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.`

This error message is being returned from the database and is a standard MS SQL error. One of the most common causes for this deadlock error is when a large table scan conflicts with an update.For more information on this error, check out this helpful Stack Overflow post. This content is subject to limited support.                

0
V
Looker Staff
1 year ago
V
Looker Staff
vishal.dharmadhikariLooker Staff
asked in Technical Tips & Tricks

What does the graph_derived_tables_for_model endpoint do?

You can use the graph_derived_tables_for_model endpoint (documentation) to get a dependency graph of all the PDTs in a specific model in the DOT language. The output can then be rendered into an image by passing the output into a graphviz tool. The rendered image will look something like:  This content is subject to limited support.                

0
V
Looker Staff
1 year ago

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