Unable to find model 'prod_data_marketing.stg_ga4__users'

[thomashandorf]

Hi,

I'm getting this error when running a new (empty) project with dbt-ga4 installed as dependency (with dbt run or dbt seed)

Encountered an error:
Parsing Error
Unable to find model 'prod_data_marketing.stg_ga4__users' for unit test 'test_stg_ga4__users_audiences' in models/staging/stg_ga4__users.yml

I see that these files are present in dbt_packages/ga4/models

Note: ga4-dbt was installed in a local directory and the initialized with dbt deps

Any help is appreaciated.

Thanks and best,
Thomas

[dgitis]

The problem is that the model is disabled by default, but the test has no awareness of whether models are disabled or not.

I suppose you can call it a bug, but the reason is that we started the package before Google introduced their user tables implementation. We wanted to add the option to support those tables or use our default user tables partly because our initial user tables are expensive to build so supporting Google's implementation is useful for larger sites.

The easiest fix is to enable the user table in your dbt_project.yml file.

models:
  staging:
    stg_ga4__users:
      +enabled: true

Then you might want to consider building a dim_ga4__users model from that (partitioned model with select * from stg_ga4__users) and disabling the older user models.

models
  marts:
    core:
      dim_ga4__client_keys:
        +enabled: false
       fct_ga4__client_keys:
         +enabled: false
       fct_ga4__user_ids:
         +enabled: false
  staging
    stg_ga4__client_keys_first_last_pageviews:
       +enabled: false
    stg_ga4__client_keys_first_last_events:
      +enabled: false
    stg_ga4__derived_user_properties:
       +enabled: false
    stg_ga4__user_properties:
       +enabled: false
    stg_ga4__user_id_mapping:
       +enabled: false

The above is untested. You'll probably need to fix some errors but it should give you an idea of what to do.

I've actually been thinking that we should do a 7.0 release that drops support for legacy features because the user tables are an opportunity and also Google added various session tables since we initially built this package (although the session data from our session tables is superior to what Google sends so there's a decent argument for keeping the current session tables).

[thomashandorf]

@dgitis thanks a lot for your quick answer. I'll have a look

[dgitis]

@adamribaudo, we really should discuss how we resolve this more permanently.

It appears that, when installing the package the default settings are causing an error because of tests that run against disabled models.

I haven't tested this out, but it looks like we might be able to use config Jinja variables to wrap all of our tests inside a block like this:

# tests/optional_model_tests.yml
version: 2

models:
  - name: optional_model
    columns:
      - name: some_value
        tests:
          - not_null
{% if config.get('enabled', True) %}
          - accepted_values:
              values: [1, 2, 3]
{% endif %}

This makes the most sense to me.

I also run into this problem when disabling models for performance reasons so I think we should do it everywhere we run tests and add it to our coding guidelines.

Do you have any thoughts?