Teo on 06 Mar 2017 20:46:10
Qlik supports conditional dimensions. For example, the user can click a dropdown on top of the first column in a table and select another field. This binds the first column of the table to the selected field. So, instead of having a bunch of tables to show sales by product category, product, customer type, etc., there is just one table that can be dynamically rebound. In Power BI, this can be supported by allowing expression-based fields in the areas when configuring the visualization.
- Comments (3)
RE: Conditional Dimensions
Currently in Power BI there’s no possibility to switch dimensions or measures in a table or chart. What developers do to bypass this lack is create a bridge table in the data model for dimensions and make use of DAX code SWITCH in combination with HAVING in a DAX measure. The method for the measure is still ok to work with, but creating this bridge table in your data model can burden the whole reload process. In the end what you want to do is quite simple. You want to offer a user the flexibility of choosing himself the dimension by which he wants to filter (customer, product, order) and the measure (turnover, margin, quantity,…) for which he wants subtotals to be created. It’s far more easy to allow a user this flexibility than giving him load of visuals to choose from.Currently in Power BI there’s no way to create this flexibility in an easy way for a developer. Qlik and QlikView makes use of the setting “Enable Conditional” on a dimension field or measure. In the setting you can enter a function/formula which evaluates to true or false. You create an island table (no relation with the star scheme) which you visualize with a slicer. Then the user picking one item from the slicer will create a true or false condition in the “Enable Conditional” setting of the dimension field or measure. You use one slicer for the dimensions and one slicer for the measures. A suggestion I would recommend is to add this functionality in Power BI desktop where you currently have the option to left click on the arrow down on the field and the options “Remove field”, “Rename for this visual”. May in that place you can add “Enable Conditional” and allow there the developer to write DAX code based on the created island table.
RE: Conditional Dimensions
'+1, voting this feature up. This is a high demand function for our internal and external stakeholders and right now just been answering the questions like "maybe this will be a feature in the future from Microsoft". The other tools support this in a relatively easy way but in PowerBI, the only "solution" I've seen is to create an artificial join table in query editor but this is not user friendly and ready-to-use out of the package. This way, the BI analyst has more real estate for other visuals rather than recreating each one to support various cuts. Have one visual with a dropdown slicer that changes the dimension displayed in the visual. Please include as a feature and this will help PowerBI win this fragmented BI war.
RE: Conditional Dimensions
Very useful feature, our users are asking for it. Besides that, it is available in other BI solutions so it should also be implemented into Power BI, to keep up with competition.