Inactive relationships, drill through/detail

Power BI
1

Hi all, I hope you are all safe and well.

I have searched but not found this (I’m surprised actually, and think it must be there but I need the right search terms!) - perhaps someone can point me in a useful direction.

So, the pattern here is analysing helpdesk ticket performance. I am interested in tickets raised, closed, SLAs, and aging of tickets, analysing in different dimensions. A very common view I like is:

(1) Opening tickets for period (i.e. balance B/F)
(2) plus New tickets raised
(3) less Tickets closed
(4) leaves Closing tickets for period (i.e. balance C/F)

I can then age the closing (open!) ticket balance and see if we have any problems building and so on.

To make my measures for 1-4 work I don’t use an Active date relationship. The measures look at all tickets and compare their Date Raised (or Closed) in relation to the period start and period end dates selected in a Date Slicer from the Date dimension.

And, the charts/reporting etc all are good and working nicely (using the Aging buckets pattern for dynamic aging (although spotted a problem with the Enterprise DNA one - there is a bug with it actually)).

Dashboard donuts1
Dashboard donuts11037×324 54.9 KB

PROBLEM
So, in my main dashboard I have four donut charts with a card visual in middle, representing 1-4 above.

If I want to drill through to see the detail of the specific tickets underlying 1,2,3,4 … how can I do that? They are representative of a particular dynamic point in time based on date range selected (because the measures work relative to the date range). But all my drill through attempts end up unable to show me the particular list … I’ve wracked my brain (didn’t take long, to be fair :crazy_face: ) but haven’t come up with a way to approach this.

Any ideas? Unfortunately this is in a large model and to provide a PBIX file for it will be a pain to anonymise. Hopefully in first instance someone can point me at some useful reading?

Thanks all.

2

@mattduffyzz,

In cases where I’ve been unable to get a proper drillthrough to work, I’ve been able to create a pseudo-drillthrough using synch slicers and page navigation buttons that to the user mimics the function of an actual drillthrough. Here’s what I would try in your case:

  1. Create a hidden page that is structured the way you’d want the drillthrough details page to be
  2. Synch your necessary date slicers to that page, but don’t actually show the slicers on the page
  3. Harvest the values from those slicers and put them in a card(s) at the top of the detail page
  4. Place a page navigation button on/near the donut chart you are going to be “drilling through” on, and direct that button when clicked to your detail page created in 1. above
  5. On your detail page, be sure to put a “back” button to the main donut page, as not to leave your users stranded on the hidden page.
  6. Repeat for the other donuts.

Here’s an excellent video on how to set up the hidden synch slicers:

I hope this is helpful.

  • Brian

P.S. I really like the way you’ve incorporated the four donuts into an overall formula. Very clear to the user, without the need for additional explanatory text about how you’re calculating Open Tasks Period End. :+1:

2 Likes
3

Hi @mattduffyzz, did the response provided by @BrianJ help you solve your query? If not, how far did you get and what kind of help you need further? If yes, kindly mark as solution the answer that solved your query. Thanks!

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Hi @BrianJ, thanks a lot for your help.

The video helped a little, but still I struggled a bit.

Where I have got to, but with limitations*, is probably exactly what you have suggested actually. So I have 4 additional pages, one for each donut (in the UK I am pretty sure our doughnuts don’t have holes btw, but that’s a different conversation!).

In order to get the detail table on each to include only items of interest I have 4 new measures that use pretty much the same formula as the ones for the donuts page. I then include that as column in the table and apply a filter on the visual to it.

So, for the Balance C/F:

CurrentCF =
VAR vLastVisibleDate = MAX(‘Date’[Date])
RETURN
COUNTROWS(FILTER(Helpdesk,IF(Helpdesk[Raised Date] <= vLastVisibleDate && (Helpdesk[Closed Date] = BLANK() || Helpdesk[Closed Date]>vLastVisibleDate),TRUE(),FALSE()))
)

I then filter to CurrentCF is not blank in the table.

So, this works quite nicely, and I appreciate your help.

  • The limitation - and any further steer on this is welcomed - in the donut page, if I click on another visual (e.g. a category of tickets - one of the segments of the donut) then all the visuals respond. But that “filter” doesn’t propagate through, and, of course, this is the “thing of interest” that someone would want to drill through too.

So, my workaround for this is to ensure that the “drill” detail table includes the column (so can filter manually), or a specific slicer is present for that.

Again - thanks for your help!

Matt

5

@mattduffyzz,

Excellent – glad to hear this approach is working well for you. If you’re game to keep going to get to a perfect solution, so am I. I have a few additional ideas and some tricks left in my bag to try, but I will need a PBIX file to work with.

I know you said this is a big model that would be a pain to anonymize, but I think all we would need here is a much smaller representative model with two donuts and their corresponding detail pages. You can also filter down dramatically the number of records using the Remove Alternate Rows function.

image

I put together the following video with some other tips for quick and easy anonymization.

Just give a shout if you want to keep working through this.

Thanks!

– Brian

6

Hi @BrianJ , I did some work with a colleague on my model and … we have it working (still not ideal/elegant as I would like). So, even got the interaction segments on Donuts drilling through to just those results.

The key to the solution was:
(a) changing some of my measures that were calculating the tasks counts for the B/F, New, Closed, C/F groups
This also improved the performance significantly (we replaced CALCULATE, FILTER structured measures to the type above in my earlier reply (i.e. COUNTROWS FILTER).

(b) Still we have 4x pages - one for each group - as I have been unable to get the Drillthrough to pass a filter through for the "include only items for the group per the forumla in the COUNTROWS FILTER.
So I have 4x pages, each with a filter for only items that are BF,CF etc.

It works nicely.

When I get a little time (next week now) I will strip the model down - it is large with many other report pages and datasets feeding in that are not connected. So, not a 5 minute job!

Thanks again for your help. Will add a note on here when I get the model pared down.