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Why doesn’t an indirectly referenced upstream public model appear in Explorer?

For project dependencies in dbt Mesh, dbt Explorer only displays directly referenced public models from upstream projects, even if an upstream model indirectly depends on another public model.

So for example, if:

  • project_b adds project_a as a dependency
  • project_b's model downstream_c references project_a.upstream_b
  • project_a.upstream_b references another public model, project_a.upstream_a

Then:

  • In Explorer, only directly referenced public models (upstream_b in this case) appear.
  • In the dbt Cloud IDE lineage view, however, upstream_a (the indirect dependency) will appear because the dbt Cloud dynamically resolves the full dependency graph.

This behavior makes sure that Explorer only shows the immediate dependencies available to that specific project.

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