Refreshing Data Source Configuration
Contents
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.
From the list of views for a table, click the row for the view you want to export and select "Export view definition". Save the downloaded XML file to your computer (for example, in your downloads folder.) Later, when you're ready to import the view back, go to the list of views for the table and from the "Data" menu, select "Import view definition". Select the XML file that you previously saved to your computer.
