Dbt: Future art for exposures

[jtcohen6]

Describe the feature

What other properties should exposures get?

• tags
• meta
  
  
  
  • we do want some traditional meta fields (e.g. owner) to be required or top-level
  
  
  • still could be nice as a catch-all for structured key-value properties users would want to define, beyond what'd be available via tags or description
  
  
• new type options:
  
  
  
  • "reverse pipeline", e.g. a census sync
  
  
  • users supplying their own string types
  
  
• new maturity options
  
  
  
  • higher than high? "mission-critical"
  
  
  • ...
  
  

Should exposures be ref-able?

• exposures that depend on other exposures: one exposure for each Mode query / Looker view, one exposure for the dashboard that depends on those queries / views
• models that depend on exposures: modeled input to data science --> data science as exposure --> modeled output
  
  
  
  • what exactly would ref('my_exposure') return?
  
  

Describe alternatives you've considered

We're likely to keep these bare-bones for a little while. I'm still curious to hear what community members want!

Who will this benefit?

Users of the exposures resource type, which is new in v0.18.1

[dwallace0723]

Is there any reason that type shouldn't just be an arbitrary string? Are y'all planning on having explicit functionality for the existing type values in the future?

[dwallace0723]

Also - would be nice to have a field for URLs linking to the exposure itself.

[jtcohen6]

Is there any reason that type shouldn't just be an arbitrary string? Are y'all planning on having explicit functionality for the existing type values in the future?

Yes, we're hard at work on some product features that tie into exposures, and thinking that we may want them to look or behave differently for different exposure types. I'd rather keep it structured for now and open it up later on if there's a lot of demand and variance, and few reasons to keep it limited.

Also - would be nice to have a field for URLs linking to the exposure itself.

There totally is, and I missed it when documenting! This is on me, I'll update that now (https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/docs.getdbt.com/pull/419).