Insights Report Builder (formerly Self-Serve Analytics) provides you with the ability to create and personalize your own reports and dashboards using the data available within Brightspace Data Sets (BDS). As the BDS evolve and change over time, you are able to take advantage of these enhancements. Any changes to BDS will impact the Insights Report Builder and you should be aware of what those impacts to minor and major version changes are.
With the October 20.21.10 release, updates to the following four Brightspace Data Sets will occur:
- Checklist Category Details
- Checklist Objects
- Removed: Checklist Item Count
- Discussion Forums
- Removed: Visible Start Date, Visible End Date, Posting Start Date, Posting End Date
- Added: Start Date, Start Date Availability Type, End Date, End Date Availability Type
- Discussion Topics
- Removed: Visible Start Date, Visible End Date, Posting Start Date, Posting End Date
- Added: Start Date, Start Date Availability Type, End Date, End Date Availability Type
What does this mean for my dataflows, reports, and dashboards inside Insights Report Builder?
Since the four Brightspace Data Sets defined above will be going through a major change, you will need to update the dataflows, reports, and dashboards you created that use those Data Sets. Only Author users within Insights Report Builder can create dataflows, edit their dataflows, reports, and dashboards, they will need to make the appropriate updates to the items they own.
To understand how these Data Sets will be impacting you:
1. Navigate to Data in the top menu.
2. Select All DataSets within the left-hand navigation bar.
3. Search for each BDS mentioned above (in this case, we searched for Discussion Topics).
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Figure: Data Sets for discussion topics.
4. Select DataFlow and then navigate to Lineage in the secondary top menu.
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Figure: The data sets for a discussion topic.
5. Now the Lineage view will provide you with an understanding of all the dataflows, reports and dashboards you will need to update by pointing to the BDS version once it is available
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Figure: The data sets chart for a discussion topic.
6. Quick tip: Navigate through the tabs right column to understand the relationship between DataSets, DataFlows, Cards and Alerts.
Figure: Options for understanding DataSets.
How do I update my dataflows, reports, and dashboards?
Now that you’ve understood the impact of the BDS change, you will need to make the appropriate changes to the items that your Author user owns for each of the Data Sets mentioned above. Anything owned by the ‘d2lautomation’ user will be updated automatically.
Once the new BDS versions becomes available, in our example Discussion Topics 7, you will need to make sure everything that is using Discussion Topics 6 is remapped to Discussion Topics 7. Anything mapped to the previous version will continue to function however no new data will be available.
1. To update your DataFlows, edit the impacted DataSet and select ‘Configuration’. Then select the new DataSet to load data from
Figure: A selected data set.
2. To update your reports and dashboards, edit the impacted Cards and select ‘Data’ section of the screen. Then select the new DataSet to load data from
Figure: The Analyzer in DataSets.
Even though version 6 of these Brightspace Data Sets will be available for 6 months until April 2022, we encourage you to update your dataflows, reports, and dashboards inside Insights Report Builder as soon as possible to avoid any disruption in the future.
