View: Introduction to Views

This article outlines the concept of a View within the Daasity platform and an explanation of the information that you will find within each View article

What is a View?

Daasity uses PBL (Powered by Looker) as the visualization platform for our Growth Product and is the recommended visualization platform for our Pro Product.

A View is key concept with the Looker environment as the "view" is how Looker understands the structure of a database table and the fields (columns) in that table.

This definition of a view enables the user to explore data within Looker as Looker will create a SQL query without the user having to know how to write SQL.

You can find information on the concept of a View in Looker documentation here

Daasity View Documentation

There are several key elements that will be contained in each View article in the Daasity Knowledge Base

View Definition

In this section you have information on what database table is connected to the View (i.e. the "source table") and how Looker understands the different columns in the database.

  • Field Name: this is the name that you would see within the visualization platform
  • Field Type: this indicates how Looker will interpret the database column:
    • Dimensions are field that you can use to select, sort, filter and pivot for custom reporting
    • Measures are fields that you can aggregate like Count, Sum, Average, etc.
    • Filters are fields that are used to specify dimensions that must be used to limit the data being retrieved (i.e. retrieve a subset of all the data)
    • Parameters are fields that can limit or modify the data that is extracted or displayed.  Some examples:
      • used in conjunction with filters that allow the user to dynamically change the output of the results displayed in the UI (ex: show a graph by Date, Week, Month)
      • limit the number of SKUs that are retrieved
  • Description: this is a description of what the field means - i.e. what is the data that you are reporting on
  • Source / Calculation: this either indicates the column in the database where the field is sourced or the calculation that is applied to the database to generate the field

Explore

In this section you will find a link to every Explore that contains this View.  There will always be at least one explore available for each View

Transformation Code

In this section you will find a link to the Daasity code that is used to generate the database table.  This only exists if the database table is generated as part of a workflow

This section may not exist for every View.

Extractor

In this section you will find a link to the Extractor documentation if the View is connected directly to a table that comes from an extractor and is not transformed

This section may not exist for every View.

Related Resources

In this section you will find links to other articles related to the View.

Related Resources:

  • Introduction to Explores
  • Introduction to Extractors