Overview
Lens is the reporting and visualization product in the Datanyx platform. It is one of three products on the platform, alongside Weave (data integration and ETL) and Maskbits (data protection and deidentification). All three share a common datasource layer, so a connection registered once is available across products without duplication.
Lens is built for two audiences. Designers create the reports, charts, and dashboards. Viewers consume them. The Designer experience is composition-heavy: drag fields onto a canvas, configure visual properties, save to a workbook. The Viewer experience is consumption-focused: open a dashboard, filter to the segment that matters, export or schedule what’s needed.
How Lens organizes work
Everything in Lens lives inside a three-level hierarchy. A Designer chooses where each artifact belongs at creation; once placed, an artifact is identified by its full path through the hierarchy.
| Level | Contains |
| Project | Workbooks, sub-projects, or both. Empty projects are allowed. Acts as the top-level container for a team or initiative. |
| Sub-project (optional) | Workbooks only. A second organizational layer for projects that span distinct workstreams. Cannot nest further. |
| Workbook | Reports, charts, custom scripts, dimensions, and filters. Where the actual building happens. |
Building blocks
Lens provides six artifact types. Designers compose them in dependency order: charts and custom scripts are building blocks, reports compose those, and dashboards compose reports.
| Artifact | What it does |
| Chart | A single visualization bound to fields from a datasource or data model. Lens supports approximately 30 chart types across two categories: Visualization (bar, line, pie, geo, gauge, Sankey, and many others) and Analytics (Metrics and Analysis). See the Chart Designer reference for the full catalog. |
| Custom script | User-defined logic that returns data or transforms it for use in charts and reports. Custom scripts sit alongside charts as building blocks — a report can compose either or both. |
| Report | A composed canvas of one or more charts and custom scripts, with optional filters and parameters. Reports are the unit Designers publish and share. |
| Dashboard | A composed page of one or more reports, configured for end-user consumption. Dashboards add layout, filtering, scheduling, and download behavior on top of the reports they contain. |
| Dimension | A reusable field or calculation that can be referenced across multiple charts and reports in a workbook. |
| Filter | A reusable filtering rule that can be applied to charts and dashboards. Filters can be configured from datasets, from custom scripts, or as date ranges. |
Report vs. Dashboard. A Report is what you build. A Dashboard is the page where Viewers see it. When you save a Report with “Show in Dashboard” checked, it appears on the Dashboard page. The same Report can appear on multiple Dashboards.
Section map
The Lens documentation is organized to follow a Designer’s workflow — from building artifacts to delivering them and migrating them across environments.
| Section | Covers |
| Design | Creating projects, workbooks, charts, reports, custom scripts, dimensions, and filters. The largest section — covers the bulk of Designer work. |
| Dashboards | The Dashboard page reference: tab types, dashboard filters, downloads, layouts, and how reports surface for end users. |
| Library | Managing all artifacts you’ve created: My Reports, Shared Reports, System Reports, Custom Reports, and embed links. |
| Scheduler | Configuring recurring delivery of reports — by email, secure inbox, or SFTP. Includes the Scheduler audit log. |
| Inbox | The destination where scheduled report outputs land for users. Covers viewing, filtering, downloading, and managing inbox items. |
| Migration | Moving Lens artifacts between environments — typically development, staging, and production. Includes Migration Plan reference. |
Key concepts
Composition
Lens is composition-driven: small building blocks combine into larger ones. A chart binds to data fields. A report composes charts and custom scripts. A dashboard composes reports. Updating a chart updates every report that uses it, and updating a report updates every dashboard that includes it. Composition is what makes a well-designed Lens workspace scale.
The Library
Every artifact a Designer creates is automatically catalogued in the Library — separate from how it’s organized in the project hierarchy. The Library provides cross-project discovery: a Designer can find all their reports regardless of which project they live in, see which are shared with them, and identify system or custom reports created by other teams.
Sharing and security tags
Lens artifacts are private to the creator by default. Sharing is granted at the artifact level (Report, Dashboard, etc.) to specific users, groups, or roles. Security tags — defined by Account Admins and applied by Designers — restrict what data within an artifact a Viewer can see based on their role.
Migration
Lens artifacts can be exported as a Migration Plan and imported into another Datanyx environment. The Plan packages the project structure, workbooks, artifacts, and their dependencies — including data model references and shared filters. Connections to datasources are resolved against the target environment’s existing Datasource registrations.
Designer roles are separate per product. A user can hold multiple Designer roles to work across products, but a Lens Designer cannot build Weave pipelines or configure Maskbits jobs without the corresponding role. Account Admins administer all three products and the shared datasource layer.