Ability to increase the number of recently used Drill-in fields that display when right clicking

[ni-rwhite]

The UI limits the number of recently used drill-in fields to 5. I've attempted to write custom JavaScript to add additional entries to widget.metadata.drillHistory, and verified they are added to the array successfully, however the UI will only show 5 drill-in values.

This is important because our customers need to be able to "slice and dice" data visually and the best way to do that on a single chart is by using drill-ins. We do not want customers to have to "Choose another" because nearly all of these customers are viewers and do not have or need extensive knowledge of the data model.

Having an option to increase this, either as a dashboard JavaScript override, or as a feature in the configuration of the product itself would be very beneficial.

[TriAnthony]

Hi @ni-rwhite,

Disabling "Drill to Anywhere" in the widget menu will remove the "Drill into" or "Choose another" options along with all recent drill columns, so drill history is not relevant here. However, you can predefine a list of drill hierarchies in the data model and add them to the widget. This way, users will only be able to drill into the columns you have preselected for them. There is no limit to the number of predefined drill hierarchies you can add. See screenshot below for reference.

For more information about drill hierarchies, please refer to our documentation: Managing Drill Hierarchies.

Let me know if I understood your question correctly or if you have any follow-up questions.

-Tri

[TriAnthony]

Hi @ni-rwhite,

Disabling "Drill to Anywhere" in the widget menu will remove the "Drill into" or "Choose another" options along with all recent drill columns, so drill history is not relevant here. However, you can predefine a list of drill hierarchies in the data model and add them to the widget. This way, users will only be able to drill into the columns you have preselected for them. There is no limit to the number of predefined drill hierarchies you can add. See screenshot below for reference.

For more information about drill hierarchies, please refer to our documentation: Managing Drill Hierarchies.

Let me know if I understood your question correctly or if you have any follow-up questions.

-Tri

[ni-rwhite]

Thanks for the response TriAnthony. Our data model has 82 tables and 1,134 fields. Each widget is specific to a particular fact table and it's related dimensions. Therefore, creating an overarching drill-in hierarchy is not feasible for us as it would insinuate that drill-in relationships are relevant to a particular widget, when in fact they would result in "N/A" data leading to customer confusion. If we were able to create and manage drill-in hierarchy templates that could be applied at the widget level for a specific set of fact/dimension tables that would absolutely be beneficial. Otherwise, simply allowing for more than 5 "recent" drill-ins would allow the dashboard builders to pre-select the relevant drill-ins for a given widget.

For now, we are just going to pre-define the 5 we that we can, and add text box notes on further drilling based on relevant, related dimensions.

[TriAnthony]

Hi, @ni-rwhite,

Drill hierarchies are set on a specific dimension field. In the example I showed, those drill hierarchies are only available for the Country field (see screenshot below for the drill hierarchies definitions), which means users can drill from Country to Age Range, from Country to Brand, from Country to Category, from Country to Condition, etc. These drill options will not be available for any other dimension. For example, users will not be able to drill from Category to any other field, because there is no hierarchy defined that starts with Category. Users will also not be able to drill from Country to any field that is not included in the drill hierarchies.

Drill hierarchies allow you, as the data designer (or admin), to define only the drill paths that make analytical sense and will provide valuable insights to users. This prevents users from drilling into irrelevant fields that would cause issues such as empty or inaccurate results and many-to-many queries. You can also choose to enforce drill hierarchies for all widgets that use the originating field (the first field in the drill path) by checking the "Always include with field" option (see the screenshot below for reference), or you can leave it unchecked and allow dashboard designers to choose which drill paths to include for a specific widget, from the available template hierarchies you have defined in the cube.

I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you need further clarification.