Generating dbt exposures using OMNI APIs

Modeling
1

Here’s a how-to from the Zello team, hope it helps!

We built a pipeline in Pipedream that consumes Omni’s APIs and automatically outputs dbt exposures for dashboards.
Step 1. Dashboards and Queries

  • Call /api/v1/documents to list dashboards.
  • For each dashboard, call /api/v1/documents/{id}/queries to get its queries.
  • Store both dashboards and queries in Snowflake for further processing.

Step 2. Decide Path Based on query.table
For each query, we make a decision based on the query.table field:

  • If query.table starts with omni_dbt_*__ → normalize it into a dbt model ref. E.g. omni_dbt_intermediate__dim_networks → ref(‘dim_networks’)
  • If query.table is a non-dbt Omni model → use query.modelId + query.table to fetch the YAML from /api/unstable/models/{modelId}/yaml.
    • Extract only the top-level sql: block and parse dependencies from that SQL.
  • If query.table is empty → parse dependencies directly from query.userEditedSQL.

Step 3. Additional Dependency Signals

  • query.fields[] → when a field looks like table.column, we use the prefix to infer joins or sources.
  • ${...} macros in SQL are parsed as dbt model refs.
  • FROM/JOIN clauses in SQL are parsed as fully qualified relations.

Step 4. Generate Exposures

  • Merge all dependencies per dashboard, dedupe, and sort alphabetically.
  • For each dashboard we output a dbt exposure YAML with:
    • Name, label, URL (https://zello.omniapp.co/dashboards/{id})
    • Owner (from dashboard metadata. Would be nice to have an email there, but did not want to make users call here to API)
    • Maturity + refresh cadence tag (derived from views)
    • Deterministic depends_on list from the rules above

Result
Every Omni dashboard now has a dbt exposure, with dependencies coming directly from Omni’s queries API ( query.table , query.fields , query.userEditedSQL , query.modelId ) and, when needed, the Omni model YAML API.

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2

Thanks for sharing, Sam! As a FYI for anyone who may read this as well, we do also have a native ability to push back dbt exposures from Omni for any dashboards built off dbt models.

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