CAST

Sample usage

Syntax

Parameters

field_expression - a field or expression.

type - a data type literal.

CAST data type literals

You can cast from/to the following types:

Examples

Goal: count website sessions longer than N seconds.

In a Google Analytics data source, Session Duration is a text dimension. The first step to counting sessions longer than N is to convert this to a number using CAST. The second step is to use the CASE statement to identify sessions longer than a certain value—we'll say 60 seconds for this example. We'll combine CASE with SUM to do the counting.

Step 1: Create a new calculated field Session Duration (number) with the following formula:

CAST(Session Duration AS NUMBER)

Step 2: Create a new calculated field Long Sessions:

SUM(CASE WHEN Session Duration > 60 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)

Notes

You cannot CAST aggregated fields.

• Casts from [DATE|DATETIME] to TEXT return the canonical string formats below. To return a different format, use the FORMAT_DATETIME function.
• Casts from TEXT to [DATE|DATETIME] accept only the canonical string format. To parse a different format, use the PARSE_* functions.

Coercion to text

When an expression requires a text string, Looker Studio coerces (implicitly converts) non-string values to a string data type.

For example, suppose we have a created_datetime field of type DATETIME and the following formula:

CONCAT("Created on ", created_datetime)

This formula doesn’t require an explicit CAST(created_datetime AS TEXT).

Related resources

• CASE expression