Kevin Williams on 27 Nov 2022 03:00:45
Currently when building models in Power BI or Analysis Services, there is no way to manually sort which order the Dimensions and Facts appear in the "Fields" section of Power BI. Everything is sorted alphabetically. If we want to move a table of a field around on the list, we have to rename the field to make things group together properly. Most times this results in some really dumb names than make it hard for users to understand what the field is supposed to represent, or it just is an odd name that we have to rename when displaying in a visual on a report.
Instead of having to rename the dimensions, it would be very helpful to be able to manually sort them. For example, we commonly want to have our date dimensions grouped together for convenience to the users. If there are 3 date dimensions and the rest are facts and other dimensions, we have to either name them something like "Date Invoiced", "Date Ordered", and "Date Shipped" to get the to group together. Since that naming is rather dumb, we tend to use "- Invoiced Date", "- Order Date", and "- Shipped Date". By adding the prefix "- " this groups all of the date dimensions together and brings them to the top of the list of tables in the Fields list. It would be great to not have to add special characters to these dimension names just to group them together.
This also applies to fields and hierarchies. I have had several complaints about having to manipulate the object name of tables, fields, or hierarchies just for sorting the objects visually in the list. It just doesn't make sense to end users. Having the default as alphabetical is fine, but there should be other ways to sort them as well.