This article highlights great ways to use Looker's parameter field with some of the label subparameters that accept Liquid variables.

Here are a few examples for some especially useful labels.

view_Label

Looker's view_label parameter is used for grouping dimensions together under a more contextual, user-friendly name in the Explore menu. You can read more detail in the view_label parameter's documentation page.

When you assign the same view_label to a bunch of dimensions, it cleans things up nicely.

Example:

dimension: cost {
 view_label: "Finance & Accounting"
 type: number
 sql: ${TABLE}.COST ;;
}
 
dimension: cost_ex_vat {
 view_label: "Finance & Accounting"
 type: number
 sql: ${TABLE}.COST_EX_VAT ;;
}
 
dimension: cost_eur {
 view_label: "Finance & Accounting"
 type: number
 sql: ${TABLE}.COST_EUR ;;
}

However, if, say, Bob from accounting suddenly decides he does not like his team's name, and he wants to change it to The Money Zone instead, here is what we can do.

We can initially create a type of pseudo-variable, using Looker's parameter field, so that we only need to change the name once and all the rest of the fields will update.

parameter: view_label {
 type: string
 default_value: "The Money Zone"
}

dimension: cost {
 view_label: "{% parameter view_label %}"
 type: number
 sql: sql: ${TABLE}.COST ;;
}
 
dimension: cost_ex_vat {
 view_label: "{% parameter view_label %}"
 type: number
 sql: ${TABLE}.COST_EX_VAT ;;
}
 
dimension: cost_eur {
 view_label: "{% parameter view_label %}"
 type: number
 sql: ${TABLE}.COST_EUR ;;
}

Note: If you don't want the quotation marks to appear in the menu, the parameter must be set as type:unquoted and the default_value must be a string without spaces, for example The_Money_Zone. If the parameter is type:string, the quotation marks will appear.

Label

In a situation where you have different groups of users who might interpret a field's name differently, you might want to have the name display differently for each group. For this, we can combine user attributes and Liquid variables to deliver the result.

Example:

dimension: gross_margin {
 label: "{% if _user_attributes['customer'] == 'A' %} Standard Margin 
 {% elsif _user_attributes['customer'] == 'B' %} Operating Margin 
 {% else %} Gross Margin {% endif %}"
 type: number
 value_format_name: usd
 sql: ${sale_price} - ${inventory_items.cost} ;;
}

User A

User B

This is also a pretty neat way to do some low-level localization on a user-by-user basis!

Another Example

One very specific use case is when an Explore name and a view label have separate contexts (i.e. an Explore labeled "Company Sales", and a view labeled "The Money Zone"), but you also need to add another dynamic nuance: a field label by region.

For example, if you have two measures that the East and West teams will be viewing, you might want to be dynamic about the label. In the following example, we have created two Explores from the same underlying view, order_items using the view_name parameter: Finance_East and Finance_West. The view_name parameter allows us to alias an Explore by specifying the underlying view. Next, we use an explore_label to display the same name for the two aliased Explores ("Company Sales"), to create an otherwise identical exploring experience for both teams. Finally, we will customize the labels of the measures to distinguish a team's region by leveraging the {{ _explore._name}} Liquid variable, which will capture and display the Explore name.

The Measures:

measure: total_profit {
 label: "{{ _explore._name}}: Profit"
 type: sum
 sql: ${profit} ;;
}
measure: total_revenue {
 label: "{{ _explore._name}}: Revenue"
 type: sum
 sql: ${sale_price} ;;
 value_format_name: usd
}

The Explores:

explore: Finance_East{
 from: order_items
 label: "Company Sales"
 view_label: "The Money Zone"

explore: Finance_West{
 from: order_items
 label: "Company Sales"
 view_label: "The Money Zone"

When exploring, the East team will see the following in the left-hand field picker:

whereas the West team will see the following:

Check out our Liquid Variable Reference for more ways to use Liquid in your LookML, and our documentation on Changing the Explore Menu and Field Picker for more ways to customize how fields appear to your users.