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gouline / dbt-metabase

dbt + Metabase integration
https://pypi.org/project/dbt-metabase/
MIT License
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Improve metadata retrieval from Metabase #4

Closed davideanastasia closed 4 years ago

davideanastasia commented 4 years ago

I suggest to use /api/database/{id}/metadata instead of /api/database/{id}/fields.

Currently, the code is leveraging the /fields API to retrieve field metadata. However, the response I am getting is like:

{ "id": 39, "name": "Companies House No", "base_type": "type/Text", "special_type": null, "table_name": "Dim Account", "schema": null }

with no stable identifier for the field name (name field is basically the display name in Metabase).

I suggest to use the /metadata API instead, which will return a nested json of tables and fields, where a field will look like:

{ "description": null, "database_type": "STRING", "special_type": "type/Company", "display_name": "Company Number", "base_type": "type/Text", }

(I have summarised the response, which is a lot larger). I'd be happy to implement this change.

gouline commented 4 years ago

Assuming you're talking about renaming a column under Data Model and then not being able to reference it by its stable database name? That makes sense, it's a reasonable change.

Another benefit is that it cuts down on API requests for the initial lookup tables (currently, separate for tables and fields).