Legacy dashboard deprecation - starting with Looker 22.20 (November 2022)

Background

In Looker 21.20, we upgraded the default dashboard experience for all users to the new dashboard experience, and announced that the legacy dashboard experience will be deprecated in November 2022.

As part of the dashboard upgrade process, we introduced a change to dashboard and legacy dashboard URL routing. As a result, any links or bookmarks using /dashboards-next/ automatically redirected to /dashboards/. Any links or bookmarks to /dashboards/ pointed to the new dashboard experience, as opposed to legacy dashboards.

When dashboards were upgraded to the new dashboard experience, Looker also introduced two legacy features (Use old dashboard routes and Revert to Legacy Dashboards). These legacy features were provided so that customers could test and migrate their dashboards to the new experience before the legacy dashboard experience is completely deprecated.

What is the current behavior (22.18 or earlier)?

The Use old dashboard routes legacy feature lets users use the older routing for dashboards. This means that URLs with /dashboard/ opened legacy dashboards and URLs with /dashboards-next/ opened new dashboard experience dashboards.

The Revert to Legacy Dashboard legacy feature lets users downgrade their dashboard via the UI from new dashboard experience dashboards to legacy dashboards.

What is changing in Looker 22.20 and beyond?

In Looker 22.20 (to be released November 2022), we will be removing two legacy flags: Use old dashboard routes and Revert to Legacy Dashboards, which were introduced in Looker 21.20.

Once users upgrade to Looker 22.20 and beyond, all dashboards using /dashboards/ or /dashboards-next/ in their URLs will be rendered using the new dashboard experience. Any links or bookmarks to dashboards that have not been intentionally reverted to legacy format will automatically redirect to the new dashboard experience.

Until support for legacy dashboards is entirely removed in Looker 23.6 (April 2023), dashboards will still render in the legacy format in the following situations:

• Dashboards with /dashboards-legacy/ in their URLs (for example, https://instance.looker.com/dashboards-legacy/1)
• Dashboards that were previously reverted to legacy dashboards via the UI
• Dashboards where customers have used the Update Dashboard Looker API endpoint to set the preferred_viewer property to dashboards
• LookML dashboards with a preferred_viewer parameter set to dashboards

Note: Starting with Looker 22.20, Looker will not fix any bugs or take new feature requests for legacy dashboards. Any bug fixes related to dashboards will only be applied to the new dashboard experience.

What happens when the legacy features are removed?

With the removal of the Use old dashboard routes legacy feature, unless dashboard links have /dashboards-legacy/:

• All user-defined dashboards (UDDs) reached using external links (from outside of Looker) with /dashboards/ will render in the new dashboard experience.
• All dashboards saved as bookmarks or referenced in the LookML link attribute will render in the new dashboard experience.
• All LookML dashboards that have no preferred_viewer set will render in the new dashboard experience. If the preferred_viewer is set to dashboards-next, it will also render in the new dashboard experience.
• All LookML dashboards rendering in the new dashboard experience with layout type of static or tile cannot be converted to UDDs. If you wish to convert those dashboards to UDDs, update them to the newspaper or grid layout types instead.
• Any dashboard reached via internal links (from boards, folders, etc) will be rendered based on that dashboard’s preferred_viewer.

With removal of the Revert to Legacy Dashboards flag, customers will no longer be able to revert a dashboard to legacy dashboard format using the Looker UI. Users may still use the Update Dashboard Looker API endpoint to revert a dashboard through the preferred_viewer property or may also use the preferred_viewer LookML parameter to downgrade a LookML dashboard.

What should you do?

If you do not currently use legacy dashboards, you do not need to do anything.

If you use legacy dashboards, we recommend migrating the legacy dashboards to the new dashboard experience as soon as possible.

The dashboards in the new experience should render as expected with some minor changes to funnel, timeline, and table visualizations and an improved filter experience. Test the changes that will be going into effect in Looker version 22.20 beforehand. The Upgrading the default dashboard experience for all Looker users Help Center article provides more information about migrating.

How can you get help?

During your migration or testing, if you come across any issues that block you from migrating to the new dashboard experience, or if you have existing identified blockers, you have few options. Looker is prioritizing these issues to ensure the migration goes smoothly.

1. Contact Looker Support.
2. Contact your Looker account team.
3. Connect to the Product Management team by filling out this form.