Generating Automated Headers In Looker For More Dynamic Reporting

In less than 10 minutes create a Looker header that dynamically displays attributes — like the current month — for your users.

Zach Quinn

— 6 min read
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Text: Audience with black arrows pointing to it.
Remember who your end user is. Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash

Author’s note: In technical roles like data engineering, sometimes you come across problems so unique to your use case that solutions don’t yet exist. This was one of those problems. On behalf of my past self, I hope this is helpful for you.

Date time operations, despite being rooted in geographies hundreds of years old, continue to pose programmatic challenges across languages; I know this because at PyCon 23 I attended a 45-minute talk solely on time operations and timezone conversions.

And while I’ve written about challenges SQL users face when conducting date and time operations, I want to address a specific use case at a point I rarely speak about: The end of the pipeline. A.K.A. the visualization platform the data consumer uses to access reporting.

In this case, because I’m partial to a Google Cloud Platform-oriented stack, I’m talking about Looker. Instead of delving into nuanced calculations like UTC conversion or handling daylight savings time, I want to focus on one deceptively simple problem I recently encountered when creating a dash.

My question: How do I create a string representation of the current month above a monthly engagement report, like the below image?

October on black background.
String representation of a month. Screenshot by the author.

The added challenge: How do I get that string representation to seamlessly and automatically change to the next month at the correct interval?

And, finally, how do I take a table (like the one below) and turn it into a clean, concise month?

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