Documentation Forms

Why Would You Use Documentation Forms?

Documentation Forms are a way for end-users to fill out all mandatory attributes associated with a data asset. The form will be dynamically generated based on the definitions provided by administrators and stewards and matching rules.

Learn more about forms in the Documentation Forms Feature Guide.

Goal Of This Guide

This guide will show you how to create and read forms.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial, you need to deploy DataHub Quickstart and ingest sample data. For detailed information, please refer to Datahub Quickstart Guide.

CLI

Install the relevant CLI version. Forms are available as of CLI version 0.13.1. The corresponding SaaS release version is v0.2.16.5 Connect to your instance via init:

1. Run datahub init to update the instance you want to load into
2. Set the server to your sandbox instance, https://{your-instance-address}/gms
3. Set the token to your access token

Create a Form

CLI

Create a yaml file representing the forms you’d like to load. For example, below file represents a form 123456 You can see the full example here.

- id: 123456
  # urn: "urn:li:form:123456"  # optional if id is provided
  type: VERIFICATION # Supported Types: DOCUMENTATION, VERIFICATION
  name: "Metadata Initiative 2023"
  description: "How we want to ensure the most important data assets in our organization have all of the most important and expected pieces of metadata filled out"
  prompts:
    - id: "123"
      title: "Retention Time"
      description: "Apply Retention Time structured property to form"
      type: STRUCTURED_PROPERTY
      structured_property_id: io.acryl.privacy.retentionTime
      required: True # optional, will default to True
  entities: # Either pass a list of urns or a group of filters. This example shows a list of urns
    urns:
      - urn:li:dataset:(urn:li:dataPlatform:hdfs,SampleHdfsDataset,PROD)
  # optionally assign the form to a specific set of users and/or groups
  # when omitted, form will be assigned to Asset owners
  actors: 
    users:
      - urn:li:corpuser:jane@email.com  # note: these should be urns
      - urn:li:corpuser:john@email.com
    groups:
      - urn:li:corpGroup:team@email.com  # note: these should be urns

note

Note that the structured properties and related entities should be created before you create the form. Please refer to the Structured Properties Tutorial for more information.

You can apply forms to either a list of entity urns, or a list of filters. For a list of entity urns, use this structure:

entities:
urns:
  - urn:li:dataset:...

For a list of filters, use this structure:

entities:
filters:
  types:
    - dataset  # you can use entity type name or urn
  platforms:
    - snowflake  # you can use platform name or urn
  domains:
    - urn:li:domain:finance  # you must use domain urn
  containers:
    - urn:li:container:my_container  # you must use container urn

Note that you can filter to entity types, platforms, domains, and/or containers.

Use the CLI to create your properties:

datahub forms upsert -f {forms_yaml}

If successful, you should see Created form urn:li:form:...

Read Property Definition

CLI

You can see the properties you created by running the following command:

datahub forms get --urn {urn}

For example, you can run datahub forms get --urn urn:li:form:123456.

If successful, you should see metadata about your form returned like below.

{
  "urn": "urn:li:form:123456",
  "name": "Metadata Initiative 2023",
  "description": "How we want to ensure the most important data assets in our organization have all of the most important and expected pieces of metadata filled out",
  "prompts": [
    {
      "id": "123",
      "title": "Retention Time",
      "description": "Apply Retention Time structured property to form",
      "type": "STRUCTURED_PROPERTY",
      "structured_property_urn": "urn:li:structuredProperty:io.acryl.privacy.retentionTime"
    }
  ],
  "type": "VERIFICATION"
}