How to get visualization configurations for custom drilling

[lauren_boltz]

Author: Won Park @wonkyoung_park 

The Help Center article More Powerful Data Drilling provides a detailed overview of how to create custom drills using liquid variables. The Visual Drilling section outlines how to provide users with a visual drilling experience (other than the default data table) by using Looker’s visualization settings in a URL. 

This article provides supplemental instructions for how to obtain those visualization settings and apply them to a drill field in LookML.

1. Enable the Visual Drilling labs feature.
2. Enter development mode and navigate to the project and LookML file containing the field to which you’d like to add the visual drill. Add the drill_fields parameter within the definition of the field, and specify the fields to be included in the drill visualization.
3. Go to an Explore containing the field and drill into it. You will see a default visualization in the drill modal.
4. Click Explore from Here from the drill modal.
5. In the Explore that you are redirected to, modify the default drill visualization as needed to create the desired visualization. For example, choose a different type of chart, change the colors, add grid lines, etc.
6. Once you have the visualization you want, click the Explore’s gear icon, select Share, and copy the Expanded URL.
7. Paste the Expanded URL into a URL decoder (such as MeyerWeb) and “decode.”
8. Copy the decoded URL, paste it into a JSON string escaper (such as FreeFormatter), and “Escape.”

9. Copy the part of the escaped output after `&vis={` and before `}&filter_config=`

10. Go back to the LookML project with the drill field definition, add the following, replacing "[this is where you enter the vis config details]": with the escaped string from step 9: 

    link: {
          label: "Show as line plot" #or your label of choice 
           url: "
          {% assign vis_config = '{
          [this is where you enter the vis config details]
          }' %}
          {{ link }}&vis_config={{ vis_config | encode_uri }}&toggle=dat,pik,vis&limit=5000"
        }
    

11.  Save, validate your LookML, and push your changes to production when you are ready!