Sometimes we make “breaking” changes to our modeling.
With canvas dashboards on the branch, it’s generally fairly straightforward to search for instances where the removed / renamed thing is used and update it
With legacy quick dashboards, the reporting validator catches the issues and we can either not make the change or make quick updates to the dashboards after the fact
With personal canvas dashboards, it doesn’t seem like anything catches that a modeling change would break these dashboards.
We’ve generally recommended to avoid issues so that it’s easier to catch issues due to modeling changes and update the dashboards (ex. until recently, there wasn’t a good way for even admins to see the dashboards in personal folders without impersonating the user). However, there’s still been a few times when users have created personal canvas dashboards in spite of the recommendation. We want to ensure that modeling changes we make that would break any dashboards are caught. Are there any suggestions for this? Are there plans for to add this?
Thanks for raising these issues — good news is that both of these are actually already covered.
1. Catch the modeling changes that break personal dashboards
We do notify publishers when their changes would break existing dashboards upon deploying to Production. It’s applicable for both public and personal dashboards.
2. Admin access to personal dashboards
Earlier this year we released a feature that lets admins manage personal items directly, without needing to impersonate users.
You can read more here: Manage Users' Personal Content | Holistics Docs (4.0)
Hope this helps — let us know if you have any questions!
Unfortunately I don’t think that addresses my concerns, so still want to leave this feature request if possible.
We’d like to know about the modeling changes breaking dashboards BEFORE publishing (which we are able to do with other types of dashboards) so we know how much a field is relied on, how much of a headache a certain modeling change will be (will it break one dashboard with an easy fix, or 30 dashboards with no easy fix)
Based on the docs that you sent, it looks like the notification of the breaking change is in the UI, but we use CI/CD and the holistics API to deploy automatically. Unless that fails, we’re not really I’m not sure we’d still get that notification.
Yup, we know about admins being able to see personal dashboards now, it’s super appreciated! That’s why I said “until recently”, apologies if that wasn’t clear.
Sorry for the inconvenience here, and thanks again for raising this, it’s a very valid concern.
A bit of context on the current behavior: personal workspaces are intentionally designed to be isolated from the publishing workflow , so issues in personal dashboards won’t block important publishes to the public workspace. Since personal content is often experimental or user-owned, we chose not to couple its validation directly with the publish action.
That said, we do recognize the need for teams to understand the impact of modeling changes ahead of time .
Long-term direction
This is something we’ve already been thinking about and planning improvements for. Our current direction includes:
Manual validation for personal workspaces, allowing users to run validation on personal content when needed, without tying it to publishing (plus support API/CLI for this operation).
Auto-refactoring support, where certain modeling changes (e.g., renamed fields) could automatically update affected dashboards instead of requiring manual fixes.
Short-term solution
In the short term, we’re planning to support validating personal workspace content via API based on changes in a development branch.
This would allow teams using CI/CD to run validation checks programmatically (e.g., when a PR is created) using our validation API. One caveat is that the validation workflow would need to be set up on your side , such as triggering a validation step in your CI pipeline.
We’ll share the API documentation and setup guidance once this support is available.
