suggestions (for fields)

This page refers to the suggestions parameter that is part of a dimension or filter field.

You can also use suggestions as part of a view, as described on the suggestions (for views) parameter documentation page.

Usage

view: view_name {
  dimension: field_name {
    suggestions: ["suggestion string", "suggestion string", "…"]
  }
}

Definition

This parameter lets you hard-code the list of suggested values for a filter field or a dimension of type: string that will appear when someone uses that field to filter a query.

Looker typically generates these suggestions by executing the following query on the filter field:

SELECT DISTINCT field_name FROM table
WHERE (field_name LIKE '%' OR field_name LIKE '% %')
GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1 LIMIT 1000

Although Looker caches up to 1,000 results for this query, only the first 100 results display to the user as filter suggestions.

If the field is in a large table, this query can be too slow or create too large a database load. By using suggestions you can hard-code a list of possible values instead and improve performance.

This parameter is also useful if you do not want certain values from a field to appear as suggestions, by specifying a more limited list.

Examples

Replace the default suggestions for the colors dimension with a hard-coded list:

dimension: colors {
  type: string
  sql: ${TABLE}.colors ;;
  suggestions: ["red", "yellow", "blue"]
}