Recovering report configuration after data source changes

[Keviniano]

Hello there!

I've come up with a couple cases with Looker Studio where a report's data source changes enough that charts entirely lose the data element they were configured with.  The setup pane becomes a series of red "invalid" values, and, importantly, there is no information retained about what the old data element was named.

When this happens it can be very painful rebuilding the report. There appears to be no way to export a reports definition to JSON or something like that, so I'm a bit stumped as to how best to protect against this risk.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

[a_aleinikov · Accepted solution]

Hi @Keviniano ,

Unfortunately, Looker Studio doesn’t offer a native way to export full report definitions (like JSON) for backup.

To reduce risk:

• Before changing data sources, make a full copy of the report (File → Make a copy).

• Document key chart configurations manually or in a shared doc.

• Test new data sources in a duplicate report first before applying to your main one.

These steps won’t fully automate recovery but help minimize loss if something breaks.

[Keviniano]

Thank you @a_aleinikov for the quick reply! It's unfortunate that there's no better solution to this. This means that if I don't have full control over the data source, I'll need to do a lot of manual work to back things up. 

Is there a way to know if there's anything in the development roadmap to mitigate this pain point, so that I can upvote it?  Having the ability to export the report's definition would solve the problem, as would having each chart cache the data element names it relies on so that it can report the name in the error message if the underlying source element goes missing.

If there's no public roadmap, what's the best way to make a feature request?