View the original community article here
Last Tested: Apr 3, 2019
Looker doesn't have a native JSON field type.
Workaround 1: SQL Operators
You'll want to use JSON parsing functions in SQL, like json_extract_path
in Postgres and JSON_EXTRACT in BigQuery to extract the JSON and put it into a type that Looker can accept, like a string.
There are a few Community articles where we have examples of doing this.
https://community.looker.com/lookml-5/defining-json-objects-as-lookml-dimensions-2356
NOTE: in BigQuery a JSON path must start with a $ followed by the index position and the string to parse, like: JSON_EXTRACT(${TABLE}.temperature_alerts, '$[0].description')
Workaround 2: API Parsing
Here is a cool open-source Python script which uses the Looker API to automatically detect JSON fields in the underlying database table and generates LookML for them (this is specific to Snowflake connections and may require adjusting to fit your use case).
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