Group permissions, R support, Chart layers, and more!

Happy not-leap-day, lovely Hex users! The last leap year was 2020, so there’s no leap day ‘til 2024— but if this were a leap year, for some ridiculous reason today would be February 29th instead of March 1st, and everyone would be mildly excited about it. I built a Hex app that digs up some data about Leap years (mostly as an excuse to show off what you can do with Hex, Jinja, and SQL).

Anyways, here are the latest and greatest product updates from the Hex team! We’ve shipped a ton of exciting features since I wrote last, but make sure to read the whole thing... if you make it to the bottom of the email you’ll find a special beta tester opportunity waiting for you. Enjoy!

🎓 Hey, PS, you know what’s so 2021? docs.hex.tech. You know what’s totally 2022? learn.hex.tech! We’ve completely rebuilt our docs site and filled it with new content: In addition to product docs, you’ll now find quickstarts, an ever-increasing library of tutorials, and an integrated changelog.

🔐 Group permissions for workspace assets​

You can now share access to data connections, secrets, and GitHub packages with only certain User Groups. Why is this important? Well, now you can do something like this:

1. You add a workspace data connection, it’s sensitive so you only share it with the Core Data Team.
2. You build a project using that connection, it has SQL cells that hit the sensitive DB.
3. One of your coworkers who has access to this project wants to get a sales engineer’s input, so they share the project with them as an Editor.
4. Because the data connection is restricted to the core data team, the SE will only receive read only access on the project, and will not receive Editor access due to missing permissions.
5. Nobody accidentally receives unauthorized access.

Slightly confused? I was too, so here’s a 2 minute video showing it in action.

🏴‍☠️ R Support​

Everyone now has access to create R projects in Hex!

R is fully supported and stable, but R-based projects are still not at full parity with Python. We will be adding more features over time as we hear requests. For a full list of supported features, head to the docs. Here is a very basic R app, if you want to see an example.

Thanks to everyone who gave this a spin the last few weeks!

🧅 Chart Layers​

We quietly enabled this a few weeks ago, so you may have already noticed that chart cells support multiple layers! 🎉

Each layer is configured entirely separately from the others, so you can mix and match dataframes, axes, chart types, you name it. I use this feature regularly to show two related metrics at once, like weekly sessions & conversions.

Hot tip: To make aesthetically pleasing multi-layer charts on similarly scaled data, use the same X-axis and enable “Combine Y-axes” to, well, combine the Y-axes. 📈

💱 Number formatting in Single Value cells​

Single Value cells now support the same spreadsheet-style number formatting as Table Display columns. Choose between common numeric types, adjust the number of decimals (but calculate those sig figs!), and customize currencies.

🌡️ Memory indicator​

A physically small but oft-requested feature: A way to see how much memory a project is using. Find the new memory usage indicator in the lower left part of the project sidebar.

It will start to fill up and turn red as you approach the memory ceiling of your kernel.

🎓 Learn site​

You know what’s so 2021? docs.hex.tech. You know what’s totally 2022? learn.hex.tech! We’ve completely rebuilt our docs site and filled it with new content: In addition to product docs, you’ll now find quickstarts, an ever-increasing library of tutorials, and an integrated changelog.

You're um, on it right now :)

Other improvements​

• There’s a new App Display option to show a Table of Contents, autogenerated from the markdown headings in your project. App Users can use this to navigate around larger apps— it’s really handy!
• We’ve added a Time Unit parameter to chart axes that are of type Temporal. You can reshape temporal fields into any of the supported units without having to write DATE_TRUNC or EXTRACT queries.
• You can now comment on a cell that is locked / being actively edited.
• “Kiss me under the light of nine a thousand stars” — Ed Sheeran upon discovering that we’ve increased the number of starred projects that display on the Hex home page from 6 to 9 💖.

Bugs squashed​

• We fixed a bug that that caused some duplicated chart cells to not situate themselves correctly in the execution graph.
• Resolved an issue around cells not locking/unlocked properly when in use.
• There was “Too much margin down yonder” in App Display options. Now it’s just right.
• We’ve banished some unnecessary scrollbars that were appearing on input parameters.
• We fixed a bug that made it impossible to select markdown text in published apps.