Adding a direct link to a topic in a data explorer query

[JammyDodger]

The data explorer has a selection of magic aliases to make the results more interactive. Formatting Data Explorer Table Results

A lot of them work automatically, depending on what table you use. For instance, pulling topic_id from the posts table will make it an interactive link to the topic - but to make the id field in the topics table do the same thing you’d need to add the alias (t.id AS topic_id). Same for the users and posts table as well:

@JammyDodger

For reports viewed ‘onsite’ you can alias the id from the topic (or post, etc) tables and use the data explorer magic to turn it into a usable link:

SELECT 
    id AS topic_id
FROM topics

These don’t carry though if you export the results though, and you’ll only get the base id. For that, you can do as moin suggested and build the topic link and alias it as an URL:

@JammyDodger

You can also construct an URL and alias it as SOMETHING_url to turn it into a hyperlink. eg:

SELECT 
  'https://meta.discourse.org/t/' || slug || '/' || id AS topic_url
FROM topics