Connection guides

Basedash doesn’t use the term columns, but instead uses the term attributes when referencing database columns. This is because Basedash plans include other data source types than SQL databases in the future. If we were to support MongoDB and Firebase data sources to be connected to Basedash, the concept of columns doesn’t exist in MongoDB or Firebase. However, we would still like to be able to let users setup display attributes (see below) on their MongoDB or Firebase data sources.

Basedash converts underlying database column types to one of the following attribute types:

By default, the attribute type is Text. If the database column represents a foreign key, the type will be Foreign key. Otherwise, see the following mapping of database column type to attribute type:

Depending on the attribute type, you can choose to view the data differently within Basedash.

You may be familiar with primary keys, which are values in your database that are used to uniquely identify a record. Basedash introduces display attributes to allow your data to be more understandable when viewed in Basedash.

First, let’s explain what primary keys are used for in databases.

For example, let’s take the given database table for users.

The database table may have been setup to use the id column as the primary key. This primary key can be used in the database when you want to reference a user from another table.

Let’s introduce two new tables to illustrate this: teams and team_members.

In the team_members table, the team_id and user_id columns are foreign keys pointing towards the teams and users tables, respectively. A foreign key is a column or a set of columns in a table whose values correspond to the values of the primary key in another table.

The team_members table isn’t really all that useful to look at by itself since you need to do a lot of cross referencing between the teams table and users table in order to figure out which team/user corresponds with the foreign key value in the team_id/user_id columns.

That’s where display attributes become useful within Basedash.

In Basedash, we allow you to specify columns as display attributes. Values in the display attribute columns will be used in the Basedash UI to represent foreign key values, instead of the primary key.

Continuing with our example from above, let’s set a display attribute on the users table to be email and a display attribute on the teams table to be name. Notice how to column header icon changes to indicate the column is now the display attribute.

Now, our team_members table will show the display attribute values for the foreign keys that point to the users and teams tables, making the table more easily understandable without the need for cross-referencing table data.

Display attribute columns will be sticky columns that will stick to the left side of a table layout, even when scrolling horizontally. If no display attribute is set on a table, the sticky column will be the primary key column on the table.

To mark a column as a display attribute, navigate to the table settings for a data source and select the display attribute from a dropdown.

By default, Basedash will automatically mark a column as a display attribute if it has one of the following names:

The above names are ordered in priority, so if a table contains both Name and Email columns, the Name column will be marked as the display attribute.

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