Looker Studio error: "Cannot render URLs while using viewers credentials"

Looker Q&A Looker Studio
1

Hello Community! Tried searching, but haven’t found anything on this forum.

I work with >50 dashboards, and today I saw this for the 1st time, across multiple reports:

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People added as Viewers get this error, interestingly I still see it in editing mode, when I shouldn’t be acting as a Viewer anymore.

This impacts both custom hyperlink fields built in Looker using HYPERLINK() as well as SQL columns with semantic type URL.

I thought there was some new feature/restriction, but I cannot find it in release notes, and I couldn’t find a setting related to this in the menus.

When I export a table view from Looker into Sheets the links are there and working.

I tried clearing Looker cookies from the browser, didn’t help.

[EDIT:] URLs work after switching to Owner’s credentials in the data source config:

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It is not the desired approach though, and we have hundreds of sources we’d need to update.

Any suggestions?

1 Like
2

Ok, looks like an intended behavior:

Pity that it wasn’t announced via Release Notes. This has an adverse impact on access control flexibility.

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This change has only applied internally for now. We’re going to launch it to all customers next week, and it will be part of next week’s release notes.

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+1 we also rely on “Viewer’s Credentials” to control data access. This update make all links in our dashboards unusable.

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Whats the impact of changing all the data to Owner credentials? I would prefer to stick to viewer, but want to keep the links in my dashboards. Only workarround I think is create a new datasource just with the links and give owner permissions

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Viewers will be authorized at DB level as the Owner so you lose a layer of access control (by sharing the data sources separately) and - let someone with more expertise correct me if wrong - if the Owner loses their access to the source (e.g. out sick and fails to renew a credential on time) then all Viewers lose the data access too.

7

Hi, i’m having the same problem since today (Sep 11) and only for external users…

example, my organization is casa and all users in casa see the urls with their emails, but if oficina enters, they cant see

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this is just with other emails… internal users with viewer credentials, have the render urls :frowning:

#help

8

Hello, good morning. I’m in the same situation. Yesterday I woke up to this news. Have you found a solution? In my case, it’s essential to have viewer credentials, and I have several dynamic buttons that perform frequently used functions for the user.

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Have you found a solution?

Hi @Lautaro_Bernhardt, we have the same problem with our customer dashboards and are very unhappy with that.
Feel free to take a look at my thread: Ongoing issue with data viewer credentials and clickable links in dashboards
@JenS (Google Staff) has provided further information on the topic here.