Spaces provide you with the flexibility to work and collaborate in a way that works best for you and your organization - whether it's a different Space for each project, your team or a one-off task.

Share data (as Views), and work (as Functions and Workflows) selectively with other projects and teams.

Types of Space

When you log into Data Studio for the first time, you will enter your personal Space, called Your Space. Every user has their own personal user space which is only accessible to them and can't be edited or deleted.

Typically, most of the work you do in Data Studio won't be done in this personal but in a shared Space which may represent a specific project, your team, or a task.

Spaces are flexible project containers for your organization to logically compartmentalize work and collaborate with other users.

It is important to think about which Spaces you will require in order to provide the appropriate level of granularity when securing data or other Data Studio objects.

Additionally, each Environment has its own System Space which is created upon Environment creation. The System Space is used to define default settings for the Profile and Find duplicates steps. For example, you can define rules and blocking keys.

By default, this Space can only be managed by the Environment administrator but this can be modified to allow other users to manage it. However, it can be accessed in read-only mode by the 'All users' group.

When a new Space is created, it's automatically populated with all the shared objects from the System Space. When a new globally shared object is added to the System Space, it's automatically included in all existing Spaces.

Using Spaces

When you create a Space, you will define the name, and who has access to the contents.

When creating or editing a Space, you can optionally give other users or groups access to it. You can assign the following permissions to each user:

  • Admin: Add, modify or remove other users' access to the Space, edit the Space definition and all of its contents (e.g. Views, Functions and Workflows).
  • Writer: Access the Space and edit the contents.
  • Reader: Access the Space and view (but not edit) published content only. Objects such as Views, Functions and Workflows that are in draft state will not be visible.

It's therefore important to think about which Spaces you want to create in order to provide the appropriate level of granularity when securing Datasets or other Data Studio objects.

Functions can be published and shared to all Spaces. Other objects can be published and shared to all Spaces or to specific Spaces where appropriate.

To prevent breaking changes, updates made to shared objects will only impact the Spaces they are shared with once they are published.

Adding shared objects

Space users can click Include from other Spaces to see a list of all objects that have been shared and choose which would be useful in the Space, which keeps the Space free of clutter.

Creating and granting access

When creating or editing a Space, you can grant Users and/or User groups access with different Space permission levels:

  • Admin: Add, modify or remove other users' access to the Space, edit the Space details and all of its contents (e.g. Views, Functions and Workflows).
  • Writer: Access the Space and edit the contents.
  • Reader: Access the Space and view (but not edit) objects such as Views, Functions and Workflows that have been published. Objects in draft state are not visible.

Spaces list

To access all the Spaces available to you, click on the drop-down arrow in the Space menu at the top of the screen and click View all Spaces.

Copy / clone Spaces

Spaces can be copied from the Spaces list, which will duplicate all of the objects within the Space and include the same shared objects.

  • To copy a Space a user must have Space Admin or Writer permissions.
  • The user copying will become Space Admin of the newly created Space.
  • Datasets in the new Space will not contain any batches of data.
  • Published objects will be reset to Draft status and will not be shared to other Spaces.

Your Space

Every Designer user automatically gets their own personal Space called Your Space. This is only accessible to that user. It cannot be edited or deleted, but will be automatically deleted should the user be deleted.

Managing Workflow steps

A newly created Space will have all default Workflow steps enabled, and any custom steps disabled. This can be changed by the Space administrator(s) to simplify the types of Workflows that can be created in the Space.

To access the Workflow step list configuration panel:

  1. Click the menu next to the Space drop-down in the top menu.
  2. Select Workflow steps.
  3. Enable/disable individual Workflow steps as required.

Sharing to other Spaces

Datasets belong to a Space and cannot be shared. You can share the following:

  • Workflows - can be shared with all Spaces (global sharing) or with selected Spaces (limited sharing).
  • Views can - be shared with all Spaces (global sharing) or with selected Spaces (limited sharing).
  • Functions - can be shared to all Spaces.

Share data

Data can be shared through the use of Views. To give a user or group of users access to a View but not its underlying source data, you can share a View to a Space which they have access to.

The ability to share a view to another Space is a particularly useful way to filter out or obfuscate sensitive data before making it available for processing by another set of users. It allows also data owners to create different representations of a given dataset to suppress irrelevant columns or run logical sorting in advance so downstream users can get more immediate value from the data.

You can also export data from any Dataset in a Space and import it to another Space, either in the same Environment or a different one.