I spend far too much time complaining (it’s being British), but here’s my brief experience of 0.33
Background: Window Server running Metabase as a service. MS Sql Server data sources. MySQL Metabase database.
Previous version 0.31.2 (I also tested in dev from 0.32.x).
Users only view dashboards through embedded web pages served via IIS. Only browser in use is Chrome, probably mixed versions.
Actual upgrade was a smooth as normal (stop service, replace jar, start service). By the time I’d refreshed the browser, it was done and ready to go.
So far, only 3 minor (1 of which is negligible):
Some of the green bar charts are a slightly different shade of green (like I said, negligible). No idea what caused it, not going to do anything about it.
Some of the date formatting is wrong - it’s not gone to default, but it’s not using the format that was previously set. I’ve found I’ve had to modify the settings at least twice to make them stick. I think this is a hangover from older versions.
One of my queries casts a datetime to the string representation as a date. In Metabase, the data model has this as a date (this was a workaround in an earlier version when you couldn’t remove the time from a datetime). When the date is displayed in the question, it randomly (?) appears as either dd/mm/yyyy or dd/MMMM/yyyy. No idea why, fix was to just use the proper date column as I can now remove the time in the formatting
Other than that, it’s all gone very well.
One last comment, the new query interface seemed odd at first, but once used to the new locations, works well. Just needs to default to table rather than taking so long to display the wrong chart.
Thanks for taking the time to write this out, Andrew. You’ve been an active part of our community for a long time, so we value your input, and I was sorry for the bad impressions you seemed to be having of 0.32 and early impressions of 0.33.
Let me address the points you raised.
Yeah, @kdoh and I felt that it was time to punch up the saturation of some of our colors like that green; things were looking a little drab in places.
This was a similar or related problem to the conditional formatting settings not working. Both should be fixed in 0.33.1 without you having to make any further manual changes.
Hmm, not sure what’s going on here. If you see this recurring and have reproducible steps, please do open a GH issue.
Glad that you’re getting used to the new query UI. I definitely have heard you and a few others express frustration at the auto visualization selection behavior, though we’re weighing this in tension with many who’ve told us they really love it. Some ideas I’m working through are:
Changing the behavior so that if you manually pick a visualization type, Metabase then sticks with that viz type even if you change the query if possible (if you’ve picked Table, it will always be possible, but it wouldn’t always be if you’d e.g. chosen a region/choropleth map and then change the query).
In the notebook/custom query editor, possibly having a separate button next to Visualize that says See results, which would just show the query as a table instead of picking a visualization for you.
Could you tell me some of the types of queries that most often get mis-visualized for you? @mattf, please feel free to weigh in as well.
Now it's fixed, it doesn't seem to be reproducible! Makes me wonder if it's another hangover from the earlier versions. I've restored the backup for my dev server, but doesn't show at all.
Any query with a country uses a map. I never use maps, I need bars or tables. I like the idea of a separate button to view as just a table.
I can't speak for others, but I like to see any visualisation as a table first so I can do a 'sanity check' on the data. If it's just dropped into a chart, you don't see things as quickly.
Yeah when we have shipping country we get the damn map. But we also get unwanted graphs now and again when modifying a question - could be related to modifying a question too much and cant overwrite the original question but alas can create a question with the same name. Can we just have an option to turn this auto choosing a non-desired visualization off? What was ever the use-case for it?
Also we take an existing saved question and start playing about with it, rearranging fields, sorting, removing fields and on the occasion where we dont' completely break it with a java indexofbound sever exceptions (we dont see a stacktrace here - perhaps we should have a wayto create an github issue automatically from these exceptions with an oauth2 flow?) we end up with the above screenshot, whats the difference between the left and right visualization, and more confusingly both can be saved with the same name and not effect the original question, so we end up with confusing duplicates - which cant be deleted - because archive is somewhat a better concept to grasp??.. At this point the stakeholder says this far too buggy.. and we're back to the old system..3 bugs in one stone (or one small demo of tweaking a question - we restart from the save question and click about slower to avoid the java index of bound completely destroying the forked question but I cant replicate it consistently - sods law)
