Be able to !include external yaml files

Describe the feature

Sometimes its useful to reuse yaml (especially the schema.yml sections relating to docs). In my case, I have tables in different schemas and sometimes I have a view to the same table (except with different permissions). Ultimately though the view is just a select * from table_xyz, so the docs are the same. I don’t want to have to maintain the documentation twice, and would prefer just to link to it.

The quick way to do this would be to allow external file linking as described here (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/528281/how-can-i-include-a-yaml-file-inside-another)

This is transparent to dbt and handled by the yaml loader.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

Duplicating the documentation

Additional context

Who will this benefit?

Anyone who wants to reuse parts of their yaml files

[laxjesse]

similar but different use case: I was hoping to be able to reference a non-schema.yml yaml file in a model.sql context to take advantage of the fromyaml context method.

I basically have a model that looks like this

{% set my_yml_str -%}
test1:
  - eligibility_start_criteria: some business logic
    eligibility_end_criteria: some more business logic
test2:
  - eligibility_start_criteria: more business logic
    eligibility_end_criteria: moar biz logic
goes on for a while ...
{%- endset %}

{% set my_dict = fromyaml(my_yml_str) %}
select
{% for item, criteria in my_dict.items() %}
  '{{ item }}' as group,
  {{ criteria[0]['eligibility_start_criteria'] }} as eligibility_start_criteria,
  {{ criteria[0]['eligibility_end_criteria'] }} as eligibility_end_criteria
{% endfor %}
from test

and was thinking it would be good to be able to maintain my_yml_str in a separate .yml file rather than in the model itself

[mingfang]

please reopen