Collections are a great way to organize your saved questions and decide who gets to see and edit things. Collections could be things like, "Important Metrics," "Marketing KPIs," or "Questions about users." Multiple user groups can be given access to the same collections, so we don't necessarily recommend naming collections after user groups.
This page will teach you how to create and manage your collections. For more information on organizing saved questions and using collections, check out this section of the User's Guide.
Only administrators of Metabase can create and edit collections. From the Questions section of Metabase, click on the Create a collection button. Give your collection a name, choose a color for it, and give it a description if you'd like.
Collection permissions are similar to data permissions. Rather than going to the Admin Panel, you set permissions on collections by clicking on the lock icon in the top-right of the Questions screen or the top-right of a collection screen.
You'll see a table with your user groups along the top and all your collections down along the left. A user group can have View access, Curate access, or no access to a given collection.
- View access: can see all the questions in the collection, even if the user doesn't have access to the underlying data used to create the question.
- Curate access: can additionally move questions in or out of the collection, and edit the questions in the collection.
- No access: won't see the collection listed on the Questions page, and can't see questions from this collection in dashboards or when creating a Pulse.
Just like with data access permissions, collection permissions are additive, meaning that if a user belongs to more than one group, if one of their groups has a more restrictive setting for a collection than another one of their groups, they'll be given the more permissive setting. This is especially important to remember when dealing with the All Users group: since all users are members of this group, if you give the All Users group Curate access to a collection, then all users will be given that access for that collection, even if they also belong to a group with less access than that.
If a question isn't saved within a collection, it will be placed in the Everything Else section of the main Questions page. All your Metabase users can see questions in this section, provided they have data access permission.
You can archive collections similarly to how you can archive questions. Click the archive icon in the top-right of the collection screen to archive it. This will also archive all questions in the collection, and importantly it will also remove all of those questions from all dashboards and Pulses that use those questions. So be careful!
To restore a collection and its contents, click the View Archive icon in the top-right of the main Questions screen to see the archive, then hover over an item to reveal the Unarchive icon on the far right of the item. Questions within archived collections are not individually listed in the archive, so if you want to unarchive a specific question from an archived collection, you have to unarchive that whole collection.
To set even more advanced data permissions based on user attributes, check out data sandboxes.