Deserialize and preview data from Google Cloud Pub/Sub in DSP

When you create a data pipeline in the to ingest data from a Google Cloud Pub/Sub topic using the Google Cloud Pub/Sub source function, the ingested data is encoded as bytes. To view the data as human-readable strings during data preview, you must deserialize the data.

Prerequisites

To ingest data from Google Cloud Pub/Sub into a DSP pipeline, you must have a connection to a Google Cloud Pub/Sub topic. See Create a DSP connection to Google Cloud Pub/Sub.

Steps

1. From the home page, click Create Pipeline and then select Google Cloud Pub/Sub as your data source.
2. Configure the Google Cloud Pub/Sub source function to use your Google Cloud Pub/Sub connection and get data from your Pub/Sub topic. See Get data from Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
3. On the pipeline canvas, click the + icon next to the Google Cloud Pub/Sub function and then select Eval from the function picker.
4. On the View Configurations tab, enter the following SPL2 expression in the function field:

   body=to_string(body)
   

5. Click the Start Preview button and click the Eval function on the pipeline canvas to confirm that the data in the body field has been deserialized from bytes into strings.
6. (Optional) Click the Stop Preview button and continue building your pipeline by adding new functions to it.