Skip to content

🗜️ Custom-joining blocks

For some more advanced use cases, you'll want to join together multiple blocks that don't already have a relation between them according to the data model. To do that on Supersimple, you have a couple of options.

TIP

Often (but not always), needing to do this is a sign that you might want to update your data model to include a relation between these two blocks. This can make your data easier to work with, and less error-prone.

Combine

Combine lets you join together two blocks that don't have a relation set up between them, according to a single field that they both share.

To use Combine:

  1. Select one of the two blocks
  2. Click the Combine icon in the sidebar, next to the data model's name
  3. Choose the other block
  4. Choose the common field on both blocks that you want to combine them based on

TIP

Combine is often helpful for bringing together two technically unrelated bits of time series data (such as user growth and revenue by month).

Custom New Column

You can also use custom join logic in the New Column step.

Instead of selecting a relation as normal, pick Custom from the end of the list. There you'll be able to pick any other block on this page, as well as the shared field on both the current and related block.

TIP

This is only available when you have other blocks inside the same exploration. If you need to join other data, you'll need to first bring it into the current exploration.


For example, in this video, we're joining together a list of Users with a list of Transactions: we want every User to have a column about the number of Transactions, but these two data models aren't related directly.

Instead, Users here have an Account ID and so do Transactions. We can use this shared field to join them together.

We start by adding a New Column step, then choose Custom as the relation, choose All transactions as the other block, and then select the shared field. Finally, we keep the aggregation as the default (which is Count in this case).

And just like this, we got the Number of all transactions column next to every User.