michael-erasmus / liger-gen

Code generator for Liger LookML using DB schema

liger-gen

Command line tool for generating Liger compatible LookML using database schema.

This tool can generate a starting LookML view file for the Liger project, following all our naming conventions, best practices and adding all the standard fields.

It will reflect the schema of the underlying table to figure out which fields to generate.

As a best practice, you should annotate the fields on the database with inline documentation using comment on statements, which liger-gen will then use for the description on fields.

Setup

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/bufferapp/liger-gen
cd liger-gen

Build the Docker image

make build

Usage

Run liger-gen, passing in the table name

./liger-gen.sh funnel_tags

This will print the output LookML to stdout. To capture the output:

./liger-gen.sh funnel_tags | pbcopy #to the clipboard

./liger-gen.sh funnel_tags > funnel_tags.lkml #to a file

Assumptions

liger-gen makes some assumptions that you'll need to follow on your table schema for best results.

• You're following all the Liger naming conventions
• All the data you need Looker dimensions are in columns in your table, ie you don't need a derived table in Looker.
• All table columns have inline documentation using the column on statements
• Your table has a Primary Key field named id
• Your table is named in such a way that it fully describes the entities it contains. This is useful for auto-generating inline documentation for standard measures. So a table named funnel_tags will auto generate a unique count measure called unique_funnel_tag_count with a description of How many distinct funnel tags are there?

Known issues

There are still a couple of rough edges that need to be fixed. Feel free to add more if you come across them.

• We're not generating all standard measures yet, most notably the standard measures for number dimensions
• The default count measure will add a sql: ${id} clause that generates a LookML warning. The sql clause is not needed and can just be removed. This will hopefully be fixed soon
• We're not adding comments such as #DIMENSIONS or #MEASURES in between field type sections