Data Studio v2 introduces a concept of Views – a powerful way to manipulate your data without affecting the original source. Think of a View as a set of operations applied to a single table of data.
In other words, it's a Dataset with actions applied to it - an interactive representation of your data. For example, you may want to create a View of your customer data with the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) obfuscated, allowing you to share customer information with other teams.
External label specifications
External labels for Views have to:
contain only alphanumeric characters or underscores,
be less than 255 characters long and
not start with a number or an underscore.
Each Dataset and View has to have unique external labels across all Spaces within an Environment.
To create a View:
Go to Datasets.
Select the data source you want to create a View on and click Options.
Select Create View.
Enter the name for this View.
(Optional) Enter a summary (this will appear under the View name).
(Optional) Enter a description for the View. The description is particularly helpful if you plan to share it with other users.
(Optional) You can enter an External label for the View in order to identify it from systems external to Data Studio. If you don't enter a value, it will be auto-populated.
(Optional) Set the View to be Static or Interactive. Like an interactive Dataset, an interactive View allows users to drill into any underlying data such as passing or failing rows from a Validate Workflow step, or rows from profiled or grouped data created by the Profile and Group View actions/Workflow steps respectively.
An interactive View can only be drilled into when explored if its source is interactive, whether that be an interactive Dataset or a parent interactive View.
Click Apply to save changes.
Using the View editor you can now explore, edit and publish this View.
Note that until a View is published, it's going to be in draft state. This allows you to discover and manipulate data before saving your changes as a final View.
Explore a View
Explore mode allows you to take actions on your data (such as filtering and sorting) without building a new Workflow. Each applied action will be listed in the Actions panel on the right. Clicking on this panel allows you to go back and see the data before the next action was applied.
You can then click Save as View to create a brand new View as a permanent way of storing this set of actions.
Available actions:
Filter - apply a basic filter, or select advanced to build a Function
Columns - exclude/include selected columns from View
Infer - infer data types for a column, such as treating blank values as nulls or a column of numeric values as date information
Relationships - analyze relationships between columns in your data. Find out more.
Chart - visualize the data (similar to the Chart step)
You may want to create different interactive Views of your data. For example, if you own customer data, you may want to share contact details with the marketing department but not billing. Alternatively, you may also not even have access to the Datasource the View was created from.
To create a View on an existing View:
Go to Views.
Click Options > Create View for the appropriate View.
Enter the name for this View.
(Optional) Enter a description for the View.
(Optional) Set the View to be Static or Interactive.
Click Apply to save changes.
Using the View editor you can now explore, edit and publish this View.
To publish a View, go to Views and click on the name of the required View. Click Publish in the top-right corner. To make it easier to track changes between versions, please enter a comment describing the changes in this version.
To edit a View, go to Views and click Options > Edit details for the View you want to edit. You'll be able to add descriptions and tags for each column.
Share Views
By default, Views will only be available to users who can access the same Space the View has been created in. You can also share Views with either specific or all Spaces.
To share a View:
Go to Views.
Click Options > Sharing options.
Select the required option and click Apply. If you select Shared with some Spaces, a list of Spaces available to you will be shown, allowing you to specify the Space(s) to share this View with.
If other users have shared a View within a Space you have access to, you can include that View in your current Space by going to Views and clicking Include from another Space.
