Downloading a PDF version of your dashboard is great and also possible via the Looker UI. In this article, we make use of the Looker API (and the Python SDK client) to do this.

Step 1

Authenticate into the Looker API.

import looker

base_url = 'https://docsexamples.dev.looker.com:19999/api/3.1'
client_id = ''
client_secret = ''

# instantiate Auth API
unauthenticated_client = looker.ApiClient(base_url)
unauthenticated_authApi = looker.ApiAuthApi(unauthenticated_client)

# authenticate client
token = unauthenticated_authApi.login(client_id=client_id, client_secret=client_secret)
client = looker.ApiClient(base_url, 'Authorization', 'token ' + token.access_token)

Step 2

Create a new task to render the desired dashboard to a PDF, using the create_dashboard_render_task endpoint. Please take note of the format of dashboard_filters, which is a string and expects the filters in query URL format. For example: "My Filter=New York&My Other Filter=Brooklyn."

# instantiate render task API
renderTask = looker.RenderTaskApi(api_client=client)

height = 842
width = 595
result_format = 'pdf'
dashboard_id = 241
body = {
  "dashboard_style": "tiled",
  "dashboard_filters": {
    "Created Date=12 months ago for 12 months"
  }
}

# fire a render task and get its ID
task_response = renderTask.create_dashboard_render_task(dashboard_id, result_format, body, width, height)
task_id = task_response.id

Step 3

Use the render_task(id) endpoint to confirm that the render task has finished:

task = renderTask.render_task(task_id, fields='status')
    task.status

Once the task status returns "success", we can get the produced document using the render_task_results endpoint as follows:

# get the produced results
results = renderTask.render_task_results(task_id, _preload_content = False)
data = results.data

# write it to PDF
with open('output.pdf', 'wb+') as f:
  f.write(data)

Note: The _preload_content = false parameter is used to tell Python not to parse the body of the response as text.