Views

Views sit on top of the data graph of cubes and create a facade of your whole data model with which data consumers can interact. They are useful for defining metrics, managing governance and data access, and controlling ambiguous join paths.

Views can not have their own members. Instead, use the cubes or includes parameters to include measures and dimensions from other cubes into the view. In the example below, we create a new view active_users which is made up of properties from the users cube:

views:
  - name: orders

    cubes:
      - join_path: base_orders
        includes:
          - status
          - created_date
          - total_amount
          - total_amount_shipped
          - count
          - average_order_value
      
      - join_path: base_orders.line_items.products
        includes: 
          - name: name
            alias: product

      - join_path: base_orders.users
        prefix: true
        includes: *
        excludes:
          - company

Views can be queried the same way as cubes; the example below show how to query the above view with SQL API:

SELECT 
  users_city,
  MEASURE(total_amount)
FROM orders
GROUP BY 1

Views also do not define any pre-aggregations, instead they re-use pre-aggregations defined by the underlying cubes.

Parameters

name

The name parameter serves as the identifier of a view. It must be unique among all cubes and views within a deployment and follow the naming conventions.

views:
  - name: active_users

description

A description of the view allows your team to better understand what its purpose is. It is a very simple and yet useful tool that gives a hint to everyone and ensures that data is interpreted correctly by users.

views:
  - name: active_users
    description: 14 days rolling count of active users

cubes

Use cubes parameter in view to include exposed cubes in bulk. You can build your view by combining multiple joined cubes together and specifying the path by which they should be joined for that particular view.

views:
  - name: orders

    cubes:
      - join_path: base_orders
        includes:
          - status
          - created_date
          - total_amount
          - total_amount_shipped
          - count
          - average_order_value
      
      - join_path: base_orders.line_items.products
        includes: 
          - name: name
            alias: product

      - join_path: base_orders.users
        prefix: true
        includes: *
        excludes:
          - company

When listing cubes to expose, you need to provide a join_path parameter. It uses dot notation to describe the join path: cube_1.cube_2.cube_3. For the root cube of the view, just put the cube name as in the example above for base_orders.

The other required parameter inside the cubes block is includes. You can simply list measures, dimensions, or segments you'd like to include. In case you need to rename some of them, you can provide name and alias parameters. Alternatively, you can use the excludes parameter in conjunction with the includes all definition includes: *.

Optionally, if you'd like to prefix exposed measures, dimensions, or segments with the cube name, you can use the prefix: true parameter. It will prefix them with the cube name, e.g. users_city. You can use the alias parameter to rename the cube for the prefixing purpose.

includes

The includes property is used to bulk add measures or dimensions to a view.

views:
  - name: active_users

    includes:
      # Measures
      - users.rolling_count

      # Dimensions
      - users.city
      - users.created_at

public

The public property is used to manage the visibility of a view. Valid values for public are true and false. When set to false, this view cannot be queried through the API. Defaults to true.

views:
  - name: orders
    public: false

You can also use COMPILE_CONTEXT for dynamic visibility if necessary, check out our Controlling access to cubes and views recipe.

views:
  - name: arr
    description: Annual Recurring Revenue
    public: COMPILE_CONTEXT.security_context.is_finance

    includes:
      # Measures
      - revenue.arr
      # Dimensions
      - revenue.date
      - customers.plan

To learn more about using public to control visibility based on security context, read the Controlling access to cubes and views recipe.