Design Studio 1.5 How to Select Only Children in Hierarchy?

[leewlewis]

  Here is the puzzle

We are using profit center hierarchy and want user to select region level, then display a chart of only the children in the region

We have an unbalanced hierarchy, meaning a region may or may not have an additional level for district or only profit centers.

We are stuck in that DS does not seem to allow excluding the parent member. This makes charting useless as the parent will blow out the scale.

Olap analysis appears to have this feature, but it is not in design studio 1.5.

We don’t want to have to add a query for every possible level of the hierarchy as there are already way too many queries.

Any idea how to only select children or the lowest level nodes and exclude the parent?

Any advice is appreciated!

Lee Lewis

[IngoH · Accepted solution]

Hello Lee,

Design Studio does allow to select children without the parent.

it is actually the way around, that when you select a parent node, Design Studio will include the children / descendants.

perfect example for that is our hierarchical filter component.

regards

Ingo Hilgefort

[MustafaBensan · Accepted solution]

Hi Ingo,

I assume you meant to write "Design Studio does not allow to select children without the parent"?

Regards,

Mustafa.

[IngoH · Accepted solution]

No.

Design Studio allows you to select a children from a hierarchy without having to select the parent.

in the same way as you can do so in Analysis Office.

regards

Ingo Hilgefort

[leewlewis · Accepted solution]

Hi Mustafa,

Good to hear from you.  Correct, we want to only select only the children, so we can plot them in chart and exclude the parents

[MustafaBensan · Accepted solution]

I assume you are referring to manually selecting children individually through a component like the Dimension Filter, rather than an ability to select all children of a particular hierarchy node without including the parent node itself, which is the requirement here.

[IngoH · Accepted solution]

HI Mustafa,

the requirement is well understood and I am referring to the ability to select all the children of a hierarchy node or select all the descendants of a node without necessarily to have to select the node as well.

Other BI clients are able to do so as well - just look at Analysis Office for example with the option to "Show Leafs only".

Ingo

[MustafaBensan · Accepted solution]

Hi Lee,

Your issue is a common problem that I've seen asked on the SCN.  Unfortunately, I don't think there is a good solution with the standard functionality.  I had in fact tried to provide this option in my blog Design Studio Innovation Series - Topic 5: A Best of Both Worlds - Implementing a Dynamic Hierarchy ... but was unable to find a way to exclude parent nodes via scripting. 

I think at the moment the only option is to consider 3rd-party SDK components.

Regards,

Mustafa.

[MustafaBensan · Accepted solution]

Yes, this was exactly my point.  There is no option to "Show Leafs only" in Design Studio, right?

[IngoH · Accepted solution]

Mustafa,

seems you are missing my point here.

Yes - it is possible in Design Studio to select childrens of a Hierarchy Node without selecting the Node.

Design Studio doesn't have an "out of the box" option to Show leafs only (which is different to what is being asked here) but it is also possible to do that.

So:

- YES - it is possible to select childrens of a hierarchy node without selecting the node itself - like all the other BI clients can do.

- YES - is it is also technically possible to do a "leafs only" selection.

I am not stating that Design Studio out of the box is capable of doing so - I am saying that it is technical possible and that solutions are available.

regards

Ingo

[former_member926971]

There is a simple solution, but it took me a while to find it.

The chart has in it's 'Properties' under 'Display' the option 'Show Expanded Node' which is by default set to true, all you have to do is set it to false.

[Former Member]

Hi Lee,

When you edit initial Datasource View on Design Studio, in the dimension panel (the left one),  if you select your dimension, select "Hierarchies" and click right on the hierarchy, Design Studio allows you to select level 01 (parent) or level 02 (children).

Is it what you need ?

Regards,

Jonas.

[leewlewis]

Thanks all for the great feedback and ideas. I am sure I mangled the post trying to describe the issue.

We are starting to do some clever navigation on our profit center grouping in design studio as the challenge is always how to display a hierarchy selection of many levels and many locations to users without forcing them to click and click and click.  Then apply their selection to the panels of charts and scorecards in the dashboard without having to have many queries and go back and forth with our BW developers. 

After spending some time with our partners at Visual BI to explain what we were trying to do, they showed us how Design Studio can meet our requirement.  And then we used the Visual BI DSX components we already have to enhance the UI even further!

Super grateful for all your replies!

Regards

Lee

[former_member193885]

Hi Lee,

Please see blog below on using ChartsPLUS (Design Studio extension) to achieve this.

Thanks.

Deepu

[IngoH]

Hello Deepu,

a level based selection wouldn't work in this scenario because the hierarchy is unbalanced

regards

Ingo

[leewlewis]

Thanks Deepu, the ignore root in Chartplus looks clever.  We do have unbalanced hierarchy.

To be clear, we need a way to include only the bottom level nodes (the profit centers) and not display the parents in a chart.  The goal here is to display a KPI alert for a region, then display a chart of only the profit centers in the region to identify the poor performer.

We want to avoid having to create, code a query to execute for every possible level in the hiearchy

How can we use the Visual BI DSX component hierarchical filter with a chart? It seems they are independent?

Thanks for your time!

[former_member193885]

Hi Lee,

ChartsPLUS supports the requirement you have above. We provide the ability to select and plot all the  the bottoms nodes below a specific parent.  In your example if you select a Region in the datasource we will be able to plot only the Profit Centers for that specific region.

Thanks.

Deepu