Models Canvas

The Models canvas draws the Data Marts of one storage as an entity-relationship diagram. Every Data Mart is a card, and every relationship between two Data Marts is an arrow. Use it to see how your model fits together and to spot Data Marts that nothing joins to. It also lets you read the fields of a Data Mart without opening it.

Where to find it

Open Data Marts → Models and pick a storage. The canvas remembers the storage you looked at last. It also keeps the card positions you arranged by dragging, per storage, in your browser.

Click a card to highlight every relationship it takes part in. Click it again, or the empty canvas, to clear the highlight. The arrow icon on a card opens that Data Mart in a new tab. Click an arrow between two cards to open its relationship, see Edit a relationship.

What a card shows

• The Data Mart icon and title, with a Draft badge when the Data Mart is not published yet. See Data Mart icons.
• The input source (Table, View, SQL, Pattern or Connector) and the field count of the Output Schema.
• The number of triggers and reports built on the Data Mart, and of its relationships. The relationships count covers the whole storage, whatever the filters hide. It counts the relationships the Data Mart defines and the ones that point to it.
• The Data Quality and Data Last Updated indicators. Hover an indicator to see the check results or the data freshness.
• Sharing icons, when the Data Mart is shared for reporting or for maintenance. Hover an icon to see which one it is and what it allows.

The badges share a line while they fit the card. A count of zero shows no badge. The sharing icons appear once the canvas has loaded the Data Mart details.

Click a badge to see what is behind it:

• N fields lists the Output Schema fields under the card, in Compact mode. The ERD view lists them already.
• N relationships lists the Data Marts this one joins or is joined by, with the join fields, for example customer_id = id. Click a row to open that relationship.

Click the badge again to close the list.

Edit a relationship

Click an arrow, or the join fields label on it, to open the relationship in a panel on the right. The canvas stays usable while the panel is open, and the arrow stays highlighted. If neither of its Data Marts is in view beside the panel, the canvas moves to show them. The panel edits the same settings as the relationship’s row in the source Data Mart’s Joinable Data Marts block. Like other panels, it groups them in sections you can collapse:

• General: Allow for reporting, which hides every joined field from the reports of the source Data Mart.
• Join Settings: the SQL Alias and the join fields.
• Description: what the join means in business terms, for AI assistants.
• Report Fields: the Output Alias, and the alias, Dedup and Σ available of each joined field.
• Danger zone: delete the relationship.

Changes save as you type. The canvas redraws the arrow with the new join fields and keeps your zoom and position. The two Data Mart names at the top open those Data Marts in a new tab, and Open in Data Setup opens the relationship’s row in its source Data Mart.

A two-headed arrow stands for two relationships that mirror each other. Pick the direction to edit at the top of the panel.

Click another arrow to switch the panel to it. Click a card, the empty canvas or the close button to close the panel. Filters and search leave it open.

From the keyboard, press Enter on a row of a card’s N relationships list. Focus moves into the panel, and Esc closes it and returns focus to the row.

A card’s N relationships list also opens relationships whose other Data Mart the filters hide. The panel then has no arrow to highlight. A relationship that joins a Data Mart to itself shows as Loop and has no settings to edit, as in Joinable Data Marts.

To edit a relationship, you need maintenance access to its source Data Mart.

Data Mart icons

Every card leads with an icon, so you can tell purchases from sessions at a glance. A Data Mart shows a plain box until someone picks an icon for it.

To pick one, open the Data Mart and click the icon next to its title. Recommended icons come first. They cover common subjects: purchases, orders, products, sessions, customers, countries, ad spend and traffic sources. They also cover the data stack: data sources, pipelines, SQL, reports, dashboards, joins, metrics, UTM tags, attribution and more. All icons below them lists the rest of the Lucide icon library, more than 1,500 icons in all.

Type in the search box to filter both lists by English name, for example cart, rocket or arrow up. A recommended icon also matches the name of its picture, so cart finds Purchases. Press Enter to pick the first match. Reset to default brings back the box. You need edit access to the Data Mart to change its icon.

The icon shows on the Data Mart page, on the canvas card and in the PNG and SVG exports.

Toolbar

• Search highlights the Data Marts whose title matches and zooms to them. It does not remove the other cards.
• Relationships filter offers three views. All Data Marts shows everything. With relationships only keeps the Data Marts that join at least one other visible Data Mart. Without relationships only keeps the Data Marts that no visible Data Mart joins to. Those are candidates to connect, or to clean up. The filter counts only the relationships between Data Marts the status filter leaves visible. In a Published only view, a Data Mart whose only relationship leads to a draft counts as unconnected.
• Status filter shows all Data Marts, published ones only, or drafts only.
• Actions runs bulk operations on the Data Marts the canvas currently shows. Those are publish, delete, Data Quality and Data Last Updated checks. It also holds the Export submenu.

The page URL carries the filters and the search (rel, status, search). Share the link to share the filtered canvas.

Canvas settings

The gear button on the canvas opens the view settings. They are preferences stored in your browser and do not change the model itself. The Joinable Data Marts diagram offers the same settings for what its cards have. Those are Input source, Fields, Status and the field rows. It stores its own values.

• View picks the card density with two cards at the top of the menu. Compact mode cards show everything listed in What a card shows. ERD cards add the field rows of the Data Mart’s Output Schema, primary keys first. Long schemas collapse behind a +N more fields toggle.

• Horizontal and Vertical pick the layout algorithm. Picking an algorithm re-runs the layout and drops the card positions you dragged.

• Show join fields, next to them, labels every arrow with its join conditions (source_field = target_field).

• Card content, the left column of checkboxes, picks what every card shows. Each checkbox hides one thing and leaves the rest of the card as it is:

  • Input source shows the badge with the definition type (View, Table, SQL, Pattern or Connector).
  • Fields shows the number of fields in the Output Schema.
  • Triggers, Reports and Relationships show those counts.
  • Draft badge shows Draft next to the title of unpublished Data Marts.
  • Quality and sharing shows the footer: the Data Quality and Data Last Updated indicators and the sharing icons.

  Untick all of them to leave only the titles.

• Field rows, the right column, picks what each field row shows. It works in the ERD view and stays greyed out in Compact mode:

  • Field aliases leads each field row with the Output Schema alias, when the field has one. Untick it to see the technical field names instead. Hover a row to read both.
  • Field descriptions adds the Output Schema description under each field, when the field has one. The line shows one row of text. Hover it to read the whole description.

Title only unticks every checkbox in both columns, Field rows included, and leaves only the titles. Show all ticks every checkbox back on. Hover an option, or tab to it, to see an info icon with a tooltip that explains the option. Changing what cards show keeps your zoom and position on the canvas. Picking another view or layout algorithm fits the whole graph again. When the window is short, the settings scroll.

Notes

• Field rows, aliases and descriptions appear once the canvas has loaded the Data Mart details. On a very large model, the cards fill in a few seconds after the diagram appears.
• The Joinable Data Marts page shows the same kind of diagram for the relationships of a single Data Mart.