Refreshing Data Source Configuration

Introduction

When you create the data source, Explore Analytics discovers your tables and fields. If you later made changes to your data source such as adding new tables or fields, you can tell Explore Analytics to re-discover them.

Safe Refresh

When you refresh a data source, Explore Analytics performs a "safe" refresh. By "safe", we mean the following:

• It does not reset changes that you manually made such as modifying labels, setting field types, or editing choice lists
• It does not delete tables and fields

A refresh operation is therefore limited to the following:

• Discovering and adding new tables
• Discovering and adding new fields
• Discovering references that were not previously discovered
• Discovering choices for fields of type choice

Performing a Refresh

You can refresh a single table to discover new fields, or refresh the data source to discover new tables and discover new fields for all tables.

Refreshing a Single Table

From the list of tables for the data source, click the row for the table, and select "Refresh table configuration".

Refreshing a Data Source

From the list of data sources, click the row for the data source, and select "Refresh data source configuration".

Aggressive Refresh

Explore Analytics does not yet have an option for an aggressive refresh. Such a refresh would reset the data source to the discovered tables and fields and would lose any changes that you may have made. It would remove tables and fields that no longer appear to be there. It could render some views unusable. You'd get errors when you try to use them and you'd need to fix them by removing fields from the view if they no longer exists.

Nevertheless, if you find yourself in need of an aggressive refresh, here are your options:

• For a single table, you can delete the table using the "Delete table" option when you click on a table in the list of tables. After you delete the table, perform a (safe) refresh on the data source as explained above. That would re-discover the table and its fields.

• For all the tables, you can delete the data source and re-create it by adding a new data source.

Before performing an aggressive refresh

When you delete a table or when you delete a data source, all the views defined for the table are automatically deleted. If you want to keep some views that you already created, one option is to export the view definition (to an XML file) and then re-import the view after the aggressive refresh.