[Bug][Grafana] team-related dashboards are failing with non-numeric IDs

[mcseemz]

Search before asking

• I had searched in the issues and found no similar issues.

What happened

With the properly configured teams Grafana Work Logs dashboard could not select user after team selection, and then could not produce any data on a panel. I suspect there are a number of other boards with the same problem.

What do you expect to happen

User dropdown works successfully, leading to proper data in panels for all boards relying on "teams" and "users" DB tables

How to reproduce

Problem is with the teams' and users' IDs. DB fields for those are varchar(255), so we can put any string there (although examples are with numbers only for some reasons). Documentation says nothing about field contents.
And then dashboard' variables and panels do not quote these IDs data in SQL, e.g.:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-devlake/blob/main/grafana/dashboards/WorkLogs.json#L1447

"query": "select concat(users.name, '--', users.id) from users left join team_users on users.id = team_users.user_id where team_users.team_id in ($team)",

So it works well only with numbers right now, as they are injected safely. Please decide, either numbers only, or string support in grafana (I would vote for the second).

Anything else

The regexp logic applied to the dashboard variables to compile proper dropdown implies bit does not state anywhere that team or user ID should not contain -- , or everything will break apart.

Version

v1.0.3-beta10

Are you willing to submit PR?

• Yes I am willing to submit a PR!

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[dosubot]

Hi @mcseemz! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the incubator-devlake team.

This looks like a valid bug. The core issue is that Grafana's multi-value variable substitution for $team (and $users) injects raw values into SQL IN clauses without quoting, which breaks when IDs are non-numeric strings.

I confirmed the problem exists in multiple dashboards:

• WorkLogs.json — the $users variable query uses team_users.team_id in ($team) without quoting [1], and panel queries similarly use ua.user_id in ($users) unquoted [2].
• DORAByTeam.json — has at least 9 instances of t.name in (${team}) without quoting across all DORA metric queries [3].
• EngineeringThroughputAndCycleTimeTeamView.json — uses team_id in (${team1}) without quoting [4].

Grafana's MySQL datasource does support quoting for multi-value string variables — you need to wrap the variable with single quotes and use the Include All option correctly. The typical fix is to change queries from:

WHERE team_users.team_id in ($team)

to:

WHERE team_users.team_id in (${team:singlequote})

Or alternatively, the Grafana variable's "Custom all value" and formatting can handle this via the ${variable:sqlstring} or ${variable:singlequote} syntax depending on the Grafana version.

Additionally, as you noted, the -- delimiter used in the concat-regex pattern (concat(name, '--', id) with regex /^(?<text>.*)--(?<value>.*)$/) will break if team or user IDs contain -- [5]. Using a less common delimiter or documenting this restriction would help.

No existing PRs or prior conversations addressing this were found, so this appears to be a new report.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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