Display Table Metadata when asking user to 'Pick your starting data'

[PhilBailey70]

I just enetered metadata descriptions for our databases into the Data Reference pages, expecting to see these descriptions shown when I created a new question. Surely this is one of the most obvious things you would want to tell your users i.e. what's in these databases...

I would like the list of databases to:
a) be much wider as I don't see why it has to be so restricted in size
b) to show any metadata descriptions from the Data Reference attributes.

It would be a natural extension to then see the table level metadata descriptions once you have selected the database.

There are other areas in the interface where this data could be shown too (e.g. Admin:Data Model & Admin:Databases) so perhaps you could put a Data Reference menu option in Admin to allow people to decide if/where to display the metadata descriptions.

It's hardly critical, but would help new users to have a better understanding of what the heck they might be looking at - so helps the self-service experience - one of the tool's major strengths.

⬇️ Please click the 👍 reaction instead of leaving a +1 or update? comment

[flamber]

Hi @PhilBailey70
Sounds like a duplicate of #9422.
Most metadata comes from Admin > Data Model, and it's the same place that Data Reference gets information, which is exposed to the users.
And you might also be interested in #11092.

[PhilBailey70]

It's similar, but I mean before you even start creating a question, rather than when you are in a question/dashboard

[flamber]

@PhilBailey70 You are talking about "Ask a question" > Simple/Custom question > "Pick your starting data" selector, whereas #9422 is both for that, and every other data-selector (like when joining tables etc in Custom question or database-selector in Native question). Would probably be a thing to look at, when cleaning up our selectors #4874

[PhilBailey70]

Cool thanks