Source System Table & Field Documentation

Help
1

I’m new to dbt, and am about to build a number of target models for my new company. One of the key pieces will be utilizing the documentation functionality. However, I want a place to document our source tables / fields. In particular, I only want to document each source field once, even if it is used by multiple target models. Is this a built in feature with dbt? If someone can point me in the right direction to do more research, I’d greatly appreciate it!

2

Look into using doc blocks for reusable docs.

Note: @Jack Nguyen originally posted this reply in Slack. It might not have transferred perfectly.

3

Ditto on leveraging doc blocks. h/t <@U05TBUYDPDW>

You can also play with this upstream_description parameter from codegen:

model_name='YOUR_MODEL_NAME',
upstream_descriptions='TRUE'
) }}```

<sub>Note: `@rho` originally [posted this reply in Slack](https://getdbt.slack.com/archives/CBSQTAPLG/p1697495345869249?thread_ts=1697491340.939189&cid=CBSQTAPLG). It might not have transferred perfectly.</sub>
4

That didn’t seem to paste well. You can also play with this upstream_description parameter from codegen:

{{ codegen.generate_model_yaml(
model_name='YOUR_MODEL_NAME',
upstream_descriptions='TRUE'
) }}