Propagating Color Rules

Taylor_Vought

We have recently been working to establish consistent color rules for various columns and values in some of our data. In some cases, it is very simple since we only have a handful of datasets that have the column in question, and it is not very time consuming to manually set all the color rules we need for each value. However, there are some challenges scaling and managing color rules. For one, our color rules may be subject to change, and this means we have to find all of the datasets with the column(s) in question and manually change the rules. We currently manage all of our color rules separately in a spreadsheet where we can have a one-stop-shop to see what colors we've assigned to various columns and values. It would be much easier and useful to have some better color management tools integrated into Domo itself so we aren't tied to spreadsheets for managing and maintaining rules. Along the same lines, there are issues with scale. We often have over a dozen datasets with a single common column we'd like to apply color rules to. Sometimes this column may have 40 - 60 possible unique values in it as well.

For a team our size (only 3 individuals actively building data and reports in Domo), this is a rather obtrusive amount of manual labor to maintain the rules and is obviously subject to human error in multiple avenues. In an ideal world, we'd be able to apply color rules to some type of source schema or dataset and have the option for color rules propagate downstream to any other datasets with the same source column. This way we'd only have to manage a few sets of color rules and not have to worry about manually switching over a ton of different datasets. Some tool like this may help alleviate another issue that occasionally crops up, which is when new values show up in a column. Sometimes our dev and product teams make the decision to rename or map certain values to new ones, and this sometimes screws up our color rules. We can mitigate this to an extent by building alerts that monitor changes in distinct counts of values, so we know when a new value shows up or is removed from a column. Again, it would be easier to have some type of source schema we can apply colors to in order to better manage this. The current color rule UI is also rather basic and the scrolling / drop down UI is sometimes rather hard to use when we have 60+ color rules on a dataset.