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Frequently Asked Questions

Need Help?

If you have a question not answered here or run into problems, post to #esd-tech-help for assistance.

Development

Is there a template for creating new projects?

Yes! See the Dashboard Setup and Package Development guides for detailed instructions.

CI/CD

My CI job needs access to Dimensions on GBQ. How do I configure the job?

Contact #esd-tech-help for assistance. This is a special use case. We have some solutions but it's handled on a case by case basis.

BigQuery (GBQ)

I don't have access to a project even though I should

GBQ customers and internal staff often aren't able to see a project in the GBQ Studio Explorer and assume they don't have access. Most often, users need to "star a project by name".

Follow the directions on this slide. It's important to choose "Star a project by name" and type in the name of the project rather than search for it since the user may have access to the project but not able to search across projects.

How do I query Dimensions snapshots?

Dimensions snapshots are in a dataset called snapshot_analytics. Table names start with the document types, e.g. grants, followed by the date of the snapshot, e.g. 2025_06_01.

To query the grants data as of June 1, 2025, run a query like the following:

SELECT id
FROM `dimensions-ai.snapshots_analytics.grants_2025_06_01`
LIMIT 10;

Access Error

The snapshots referenced from the Dimensions release views can not be queried directly by our staff accounts. You may receive an error like the following if you aren't querying the snapshot_analytics dataset:

Access Denied: Table dimensions-ai:release_2025_06_01.grants: User does not have permission to query table dimensions-ai:release_2025_06_01.grants, or perhaps it does not exist.

Python

Which version of Python should I use?

Python 3.12 is recommended for new projects. Our packages support Python 3.10+. See the Developer Guide for installation instructions.

How do I setup Python package registries?

See the Team Registry guide for complete Poetry and pip configuration with our team registries.

How can I see if an update to a Python package I'm using will be compatible with ESD internal packages?

Our team maintains a project called esd-python-dependencies that enables this. Both poetry and pip support --dry-run which will scan your project dependencies for compatibility but not actually change your environment.

In this example, we will check to see if the latest release of spacy is compatible with internal ESD packages.

pip install --upgrade spacy esd-python-dependencies --dry-run 

poetry add spacy@latest esd-python-dependencies --dry-run

Dimensions Apps

Authentication

How can I create a JWE key? 
echo $(LC_ALL=C tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9' < /dev/urandom | head -c 64)

-join ((48..57) + (65..90) + (97..122) | Get-Random -Count 64 | ForEach-Object {[char]$_})

APIs

Where is the documentation for the Dimensions ID Search API?

The documentation is maintained in a Google Doc. All internal users should have access.