Direct Link

You can share any deployment of your Community Connector with a link. When a user follows the link, it will take them directly to Looker Studio with your connector selected.

To get a direct link for your community connector, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to Apps Scripts and open the project of the Community Connector to share. Click Deploy > Manage Deployments.
  2. Click the Active deployment to share. Under Looker Studio Add-on URL, a direct link to Looker Studio for the selected deployment is displayed, click Copy. Alternatively, under Deployment ID click Copy and append the copied Deployment ID to the following URL to form a direct link: 
    https://lookerstudio.google.com/datasources/create?connectorId=DEPLOYMENT_ID
  3. The direct link can be shared with users. For example, send it via email, post it on a website, blog, social media, etc.

If you know the configuration values that your users will want ahead of time, you can provide additional query parameters to pre-populate the connector configuration. The pre-populated configuration can still be modified by users.

To create a preconfigured direct link, add the following optional query parameters:

  • connectorConfig - A URL encoded JSON string containing key-value pairs to use to pre-populate the connector configuration.

    • Key names must match the parameter names defined in the connector config.
    • TEXTINPUT, TEXTAREA, and SELECT_SINGLE values should be strings.
    • CHECKBOX values should be a boolean.
    • SELECT_MULTIPLE values should be an array of strings.

  • reportTemplateId - An identifier for the default reporting template to use for the connector. If a default template is set in the connector manifest, this value will override the manifest. See How To Add The Report Template for the value to use.

Example

The following example illustrates how to create a direct link to the StackOverflow Questions community connector. The direct link pre-populates the connector configuration to use the looker-studio tag on Stack Overflow.

Step 1: Create the config JSON

The keys for the config JSON are the names of each configuration item. For the Stack Overflow config, these names are tagged, pagesize, and sort.

JSON before encoding

{
    "tagged": "looker-studio",
    "pagesize": 25,
    "sort": "activity"
}

Step 2: Encode the URL

After the configuration JSON is created, URL encode the object. An easy option is to use the encodeURIComponent JavaScript function.

Encoding Url

// get a reference to the jsonConfig
var jsonConfig;
var encoded = encodeURIComponent(jsonConfig);

The result is the following encoded string:

"%7B%22tagged%22%3A%22looker-studio%22%2C%22pagesize%22%3A%2225%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%22activity%22%7D"

Step 3: Build the URL

The following code builds the direct link. Note that you will need your connector's Deployment ID to build the URL.

data-studio/links.gs
// These variables should be filled in as necessary for your connector.
var configJSON;
var templateId;
var deploymentId;

var params = [];

const jsonString = JSON.stringify(configJSON);
const encoded = encodeURIComponent(jsonString);
params.push('connectorConfig=' + encoded);

params.push('reportTemplateId=' + templateId);

params.push('connectorId=' + deploymentId);

const joinedParams = params.join('&');
const URL = 'https://datastudio.google.com/datasources/create?' + joinedParams;

This returns the following encoded URL, a pre-populated direct link for the connector:

https://lookerstudio.google.com/datasources/create?connectorConfig=%7B%22tagged%22%3A%22looker-studio%22%2C%22pagesize%22%3A%2225%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%22activity%22%7D&reportTemplateId=1lR9CGfx3uyQp6oz7oAgA1rsqZViA-IQs&connectorId=AKfycbwGMj-oe532y-NEbMHo-KLUCEz0EEGOZj-3lhEgw7q65-hs-T_F9B3Qjw