---
title: "Creating a View"
canonical: "https://wiki.yellowfinbi.com/space/USER71/2032127/Creating%20a%20View"
format: markdown
---
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## Overview
The View is a metadata layer used by Yellowfin to hide the complexity of database structures from Report Writers. The View is used to define which columns in your database you wish to make available for Report Building. These fields may come from multiple tables and therefore will require joins to be defined (the business logic that links rows in a table together).
The two major steps in creating a view include:
1. **Relationship Entity Diagram** - selecting the tables you need from your database and defining how data in these tables are joined
2. **View Field Selection** - defining which fields you wish to make available from these tables and providing metadata for them.
> See [Views](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2032389) for more information.
## Create
This section will walk through the initial steps of creating the view, including selecting the data source connection to base it on and the builder type to use.
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## Entity Relationship
The Entity Relationship is one of the key components of the view builder. This allows you to define all the key relationships between your selected database tables.
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> See [Drag & Drop View Builder](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2031974) for more information.
## Selecting Fields
Select fields that you wish to make available to your end users for reporting. Only columns selected from each table in your Unattached list will be available for reporting.
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> See [Table Properties](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2032037) for more information.
## Field Categories & Meta Data
Initially, fields selected from the previous step will all be in the **Unattached** panel in folders that represent the tables that they originated from. These fields have not had meta data associated with them and **cannot** be used by your report writers. You must assign fields to categories (folders) in the **Available Fields** panel. The reason you do this is to organise you fields in a way that is logical for the Report Writer, giving you the chance to group them differently than the table structure in the database.
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> See [View Fields](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2032369) for more information.
## Field Format
The format options will provide the default for how the field will be used on the report. A user will still be able to change a format for a specific report.
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> See [Field Format](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2031983) for more information.
## Calculated Fields
In addition to fields from your database you can create calculated fields, pre-defined filters, and date hierarchy fields.
### Calculated Metric
This type of calculated field allows you to build a calculation that will return a numeric value as the result. In this example we will aim to calculate profit by subtracting cost from invoice figures.
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> See [View Calculated Fields](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2032379) for more information.
### Date Hierarchy Fields
Date Hierarchy calculated fields allow you to build levels of a hierarchy based on a single date field in your database. This can then be used to define Drill Down hierarchies, or for other purposes in reports.
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## Drill Down Hierarchy
The hierarchy allows report users to drill down a dimensional hierarchy by limiting the result set as they select one level to the next. For example drill from Year (2014) to Month (August) etc.
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> See [Drill Down Hierarchies](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2031985) for more information.
## View Summary & Saving
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> See [View Summary](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2032030) for more information.
## Further Information
For more information around the creation of Views in Yellowfin see the [Views](https://yellowfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/USER71/pages/2032389) section of the wiki.