Good day,
We have a Looker Studio report with information that spreads across countries, and branches (i.e. physical branches in various countries). We embed our Looker Studio report in another application, and we'd like to default our information to a specific branch and country based on the user viewing the report.
We are thus looking for behaviour similar to URL parameters. The problems we have with the existing approach for URL parameters on Looker Studio are that they need to:
- be redefined per data source, and our country and branch data are the same across multiple data sources. We also have many branches, so it would be tedious to repopulate the same branch names for each data source (and update them every time a new branch is opened)
- be given a separate parameter name for each data source, which leads to names like country1, country2, country3 etc. to cater for all the data sources, resulting in a very long URL
We found that the default URL parameter forming behaviour (i.e. without explicitly using any URL parameters) from selecting for instance a country and branch from the control fields provide a better structure for what we require. For example, the following forms when we select the country Uganda and the Buffalo branch
?params=%7B%22df4%22:%22include%25EE%2580%25800%25EE%2580%2580IN%25EE%2580%2580Zambia%22,%22df3%22:%22include%25EE%2580%25800%25EE%2580%2580IN%25EE%2580%2580Buffalo%22%7D
With this, we can change Uganda and Buffalo to our values of interest and it filters the data as we require, without explicitly having to define any URL parameters. It appears to be directly filtering on the fields of interest. I assume this behaviour was introduced to enable link sharing to a filtered report, but it essentially has the behaviour we need for our use case.
My concern with this approach is that I do not know how the key values are defined in the URL. df4 and df3 appears to be the key values of interest that represent the underlying fields of country and branch, but could these key values change over time? Under which circumstances would these key values change? And is there a way to set the key values ourselves?
Please let me know if more information is required, or if you have any questions on the above. Thanks!
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