Written by: Sagar Warghade, Senior Product Manager
Insights Report Builder allows you to create and personalize your reports and dashboards using the data available within Brightspace Data Sets (BDS). As the BDS evolves and changes over time, you can take advantage of these enhancements. Any changes to BDS will impact on the Insights Report Builder and you should be aware of those - Impact of Minor & Major Version Changes on Insights Report Builder
With the new BDS Major version 9, updates to the following Brightspace Data Sets will occur:
- Quiz Attempts BDS Removed: GracePeriod and ExtendedDeadline
- Renamed: GracePeriodExceededBehaviour to TimeLimitExceededBehaviour
- Addition: IsSynchronous
- Quiz Objects BDS Removed: TimeLimitGracePeriod, ShowClock and TimeLimitExceededBehavior
- Addition: DeductionPercentage and DeductionPercentage
- User Logins BDS Removed: OrgId and TimeOff
- Addition: LoginSource
- Enrollments and Withdrawals BDS Removed: EnrollmentType
- Awards Issued BDS Removed: Type, Credits and IsRevoked
- Addition: RevokedDate, RevokedReason, RevokedBy, LastModifiedBy, LastModifiedDate and Version
- Grade Schemes BDS Removed: GradeSchemeRangeId and IsDeleted
- Role Details BDS Removed: OrgId, ClassListDisplayRoleCategory, ClassListRoleCategory, ClassListRoleCategoryOrder and Version
- Addition: LastModifiedDate and DeletedBy
To understand the full details, you can read Motivations Behind The Changes In Data Hub Brightspace Data Set (BDS) Major Version 9
To enable BDS Major version 9 in Data Hub:
1. Ensure the ‘Can Access Brightspace Data Sets’ permission is granted to administrators at the org level. Admin role will also require "Can See/Edit Config Variable Values" turned on at the org level.
2. Navigate to ‘Config Variable Browser’
3. Select 'BrightspaceDatasets' under the 'Tools' section and then choose the 'Version' option
4. Ensure the ‘d2l.Tools.BrightspaceDataSets.Version’ configuration variable is set to version ‘9.0’ or higher. New and changed data sets appear the first time the data set runs after the version update.
What does this mean for my dataflows, reports, and dashboards inside Insights Report Builder?
Since the above Brightspace Data Sets will be going through a major change, you will need to update the dataflows, reports, and dashboards you created that use those Data Sets. In addition, Author users in Insights Report Builder can only create dataflows and edit their dataflows, reports and dashboards. Therefore, they will need to make the right updates to the items they own.
To understand how these Data Sets changes will be impacting you:
1. Navigate to ‘Data’ in the top menu in Insights Report Builder
2. Select ‘All DataSets’ within the left-hand navigation bar
3. Search for each BDS mentioned above (in this case, we searched for Quiz Objects)
4. Select the DataFlow and once inside, navigate to ‘Lineage’ in the top secondary menu
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
6. Quick tip: Navigate through the tabs right column to understand the relationship between DataSets, DataFlows, Cards, and Alerts
How do I update my dataflows, reports, and dashboards?
Now that you have understood the impact of the BDS change, you will need to make the right changes to the items that your Author user owns for each of the Data Sets mentioned above.
Once the new BDS major version 9 becomes available, in our example Quiz Objects 9, you will need to make sure everything that is using Quiz Objects 8 is remapped to Quiz Objects 9. Anything mapped to the earlier 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 change the Input DataSet to the latest version.
2. To update your reports and dashboards, edit the impacted Cards and select the ‘Data’ section of the screen. Then select the new version of the DataSet.
Summary:
On April 30, 2024, as a key milestone in the Insights Report Builder (IRB) visualization infrastructure upgrade to AWS, IRB authors will see their permissions adjusted to view-only access within the existing IRB infrastructure. This allows D2L to get a complete list of existing customer-created assets for migration to the new IRB (QuickSight) infrastructure. You will still be able to use all your existing reports. Although you will retain the ability to use all your existing reports, you will not be able to create or edit reports in the existing IRB infrastrucutre during this transition. However, you can create new reports on IRB (QuickSight). To understand the full details, you can read Insights Report Builder – Visualization Infrastructure Upgrade
Since authors will not have edit access to existing IRB infrastructure as of 30-April-2024. We strongly encourage you to update existing dataflows, reports and dashboards inside Insights Report Builder as soon as possible after you receive the December 2023/20.23.12 release and prior to April 30, 2024 to ensure everything runs smoothly in the future.
BDS Version 9 has been made available in December 2023/20.23.12 release, and we expect you to no longer rely on BDS Version 8 and below. Therefore, to ensure the upkeep of the health of our platform and continued data integrity, we will be deleting BDS version 8 and below in Insights Report Builder in July 2024. In addition, we will also delete corresponding Data Flows, Cards, Reports and Dashboards that use BDS Version 8 and below.
Related blog posts:
Insights Report Builder – Visualization Infrastructure Upgrade
Impact Of Minor & Major Version Changes On Self-Serve Analytics
Motivations behind the changes in Data Hub Brightspace Data Set (BDS) Major Version 9
