[0.31: DONE] Disabling/hiding X-Ray feature

Does anyone know how to disable the x-ray feature? I tried turning it off in the admin panel but it still appears as an option in questions. Tried after login/out and refreshing browser cache, still appears…

1 Like

What do you see in the metabase database if you use:

SELECT * FROM setting where setting.key='enable-xrays';

|xray-max-cost|approximate|
|enable-xrays|false|

My client is ubuntu (FF & chrome browsers), server centos, postgres db on centos

With the revamped x-ray, there isn’t a way to disable them. I’m interested in your use case though – why do you want to disable them?

We have a similar issue. We just don’t really want to use X-Rays. Our primary use case is dashboards that developers or analysts have hand-written for staff to use, that are highly curated and very precise. Putting X-Rays front and center is thoroughly confusing. Nobody is going to know what they’re supposed to click on.

Our old flow was that people would click into the Dashboards section, and find the one of several dashboards that they’re interested in studying at that moment. This is totally gone now. They have to scroll past irrelevant X-Rays to find “Our analytics” (a name that confuses even me) and traverse a deep hierarchy to find a dashboard of interest.

I won’t be able to upgrade until something is resolved with the prominence of X-Rays, it will confuse people to the point where they will be unable to find the information they need. Ideally we should be able to control homepage modules and disable X-Rays from showing up automatically.

2 Likes

@sljonathan FWIW if you pin a dashboard in the root collection (/collection/root) it will replace the X-rays on the homepage.

Thanks for the feedback, @sljonathan.

We’ve realized we need to make this more obvious, but if you pin any dashboards in your top-level collection (“our analytics”), those will appear on the home page for all your users instead of the x-ray suggestions (provided they have at least View permission for the “our analytics” collection). This way your most important company-wide dashboards will be front-and-center.

You can also pin dashboards (or questions, or pulses) in any of your collections to make them stand out as your users browse collections, or use search to quickly get to deeply nested dashboards that you might refer to often.

Gotcha, thanks guys. Pinning may be an effective workaround here, agree that it should be more prominent that it will suppress X-Rays, and given that, pinning as a concept should probably be more prominent too :slight_smile:

Forums and bug reports bring out the grump in all of us, so I apologize about that, but thank you sincerely for Metabase! It’s been a huge boon to our organization and is objectively impressive.

2 Likes

@sbelak Most of our end users are non IT and get confused by it. Ideally it would be useful to restrict access to the feature based on a role e.g. “Power User/Developer”. Such a user could then use the product of the x-ray to seed a new dashboard for subsequent distribution.

We’ve also experienced performance issues especially when the source table is heavily linked to other tables in the metabase data model and/or when there has been repeated use of the x-ray in the same browser session (Firefox) - havent determined whether its the model or memory management in the browser that contributes most.

Thanks for the clarification Maz. It would be great if feature versions have ways to customize the home page, it would be really useful to help direct users to things they need to see rapidly in each use case.

All the best!

Thanks, Pablo. Could you elaborate on how you’d like to be able to customize the home page, and what kinds of things you’d like to be able to put there?

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but this to hide the X-rays, I just created a dummy dashboard containing just text. That way, I could include instructions on how to find stuff without worrying about the security of the analytics on the home page:

1 Like

When you say this, do you mean it's too much cognitive load to figure out which dashboards should be accessible to your whole org?

No, means I may have multiple customers accessing the server, so may not want any single item to be visible to everyone.
Not decided yet.
Also, I’m using Metabase more for Dashboards than data exploration so having Xrays front and centre isn’t what I need at the moment.
Not a criticism, just a use case.

Gotcha. Just so you know, one thing you can do is edit the permissions of the “Our analytics” collection to control which groups can see the dashboards that are saved there. If a user doesn’t have permission to see the contents of the items in “Our Analytics,” the pinned dashboards won’t show up on the homepage for them (they’ll see the x-ray suggestions instead).

Also, x-rays respect all view limitations/permissions, so users who shouldn’t see some data won’t get those x-rays.

The biggest issue is when we use with Bigquery. I have multi TB tables that people will just casually click around on x-rays. Each TB processed costs $5 :(.

1 Like

I customized my metabase from source code, so it will hide x-ray button.
I think it could be handled from env from admin and data reference could see that flag whether to disabled or enabled x-ray button

Also I hide X-Ray from homepage