Week over week analysis with custom fiscal year: Use case of a fuel and convenience retail operator
Introduction Week-over-week (WoW) analysis is a key part of performance tracking for fast-moving, high-traffic businesses such as convenience stores, gas stations, and car washes. For these organizations, aligning the fiscal calendar with operational cycles rather than the standard calendar year makes reporting more meaningful. In this use case, the fiscal year begins on the closest Sunday to January 1st, ensuring each year starts with a full week. This structure simplifies weekly reporting and keeps week-to-week comparisons consistent across years, which is important for tracking trends like fuel sales, store traffic, and service volumes. While nonstandard, this setup is commonly used in practice. What the Solution Does For standard, fixed calendar or fiscal years, week-over-week analysis can be achieved using the “First Month of Fiscal Calendar” and “First Day of Week” settings, along with the PASTYEAR function. However, for dynamic fiscal years that begin on a weekday closest to January 1st, these features don’t provide a usable solution, since the start date can fall in the previous or following calendar year. The solution uses the https://www.sisense.com/marketplace/add-on/filtered-measure/ and a custom dashboard script to handle the custom fiscal year. Two year filters are added to the dashboard: one represents the selected fiscal year (user-selectable), and the other represents the prior year for comparison (locked and optionally hidden), which is automatically set with a dashboard script. The Filtered Measure plugin applies the selected-year filter to the measure for the chosen period, while the prior-year filter applies to the measure for the corresponding period in the previous year. This approach ensures that week-over-week calculations respect the custom fiscal calendar, providing accurate comparisons across equivalent weeks. Note: In this particular implementation, the fiscal years and week numbers are pre-calculated in the database and stored as numeric columns. To create a Date dimension table in your Elasticube with fiscal years starting on the first Sunday closest to January 1st, refer to the SQL example below. Why It’s Useful This solution addresses the native functional limitation by respecting the custom fiscal calendar, ensuring weekly trends are comparable across years. As a result, teams can reliably track key metrics, such as fuel sales, store traffic, and service volumes, on a true week-by-week basis, supporting better operational planning and more informed decision-making. Attachments WeekoverWeekAnalysiswithCustomFiscalYear.dash.txt (dashboard) Sample ECommerce - Custom Fiscal Year.smodel.txt (elasticube) JS Script - Automatic Update for Second Year Filter.txt (dashboard script) SQL Query - Dim Date with Custom Fiscal Year.txt (custom table SQL query) For the script to hide the second filter, refer to this BINextLevel article: https://www.binextlevel.com/post/hide-dashboard-filters. Note: remove the .txt extension before importing the dashboard (.dash) and the Elasticube (.smodel) files.
Request for API to Programmatically Retrieve Widget-Level Error Responses in Sisense Dashboards
We are currently conducting automated tests on Sisense dashboards to ensure data reliability and visualization integrity. To detect failures, we’ve been using HTML tags to inspect widget responses. However, this approach has limitations especially with indicator widgets that use the <canvas> tag, which restricts DOM-level access and makes it difficult to capture error states. We’ve also explored using the POST /datasources/{cubeName}/jaql API to fetch data, but the payload is large and complex, making it challenging to parse programmatically for error detection. Given these constraints, we’re looking for an API or method that allows us to programmatically retrieve widget-level error responses or statuses from the dashboard. This would significantly improve the reliability and coverage of our automated testing framework Feature Request: Introduce an API or system-level mechanism to: Detect and retrieve widget-level error states Identify query execution failures tied to specific widgets Support automated testing and validation workflows
Sisense Add-On customBarColumnChart Disappearing Filters
We have an add on in Sisense named "customBarColumnChart", and when enabled, it then acts how the video is showing with the filter selection. When it is disabled, it acts normally. We use that add on in multiple dashboards, and want to know if there is a way around this, or if we need to edit each widget script to perform the custom chart sorting.
Add filter option in Report Manager UI to see errored reports
There is no way to filter the errored schedule reports on the Report Manager dashboard. We need to scroll through the pages to see the failures of the day. Is there any way you can add one more filter value, Failed, along with the following options (Running, Not Running, and Pending)?
Ability to add many items to add to widget at once
When adding a new piece of data to a widget, instead of having to add one at a time, add a checkbox to each item to the left of each item in the list. The user can check the box for each item they want to add to the widget, instead of having to add one at a time. This will speed up adding many items to a widget.
Geo Analysis or Spatial Insights - Add-Ons that Nail It!
With the importance of geographic analysis coming to light over the last few years, Sisense and QbeeQ are offering geo spatial add-ons that offer a quick and intuitive way to visualize data over an area of interest. Read the article to learn about the full picture of an advanced Geo-Spatial analytical story.Plugin - Enable Multicolor Legend Items for Conditional and Range
Overview Legend items come with colored boxes that represent the data points in the chart. The color of each box matches the bar/column/bubble in the chart, as long as the measure is set to a single color, and not conditional or range. When conditional or range is used, the legend item's box becomes grey (or the palette's default color for Scatter Charts), because the box cannot natively accommodate multiple colors. This plugin solves this limitation by: splitting the box into smaller strips to accommodate multiple colors, for conditional, or creating a gradient of two colors in the box, for range. Limitations This plugin is only relevant to Bar Charts, Column Charts, and Scatter Charts. Other chart types either do not support conditional/range or have their own version of legends (e.g., Area Map). If there are too many legend items, wider boxes might affect spacing and cause certain items to be cut off. See the Configuration section below for more details. Installation Instructions Download and unzip the plugin zip file. Extract the files directly (do not extract into a new folder); the plugin files are already organized within a folder in the zip file. Upload the multiColorLegendItems folder to the plugins directory on your Sisense server (/opt/sisense/storage/plugins). Check the Add-ons page in the Admin tab (under Server & Hardware) and make sure the new plugin is listed and enabled. Modify the config file as needed (this can be done before of after the upload). Configurations This plugin comes with a configuration file that can be updated as needed. The four configuration settings in the file are: numberOfColorsForWiderBoxes . If there are too many conditions, the box may be too small to accommodate all colors, so the width may need to be increased. In this case, specify the threshold for the number of colors. For example, a threshold of 5 means the box width will be increased if there are five or more colors assigned to it. Otherwise, the original width will be kept. Note: Wider boxes might affect spacing and cause certain legend items to be cut off if there are too many of them. To work around this, the verticalLayout setting can be set to true. The default value is 5. widthMultiplierForConditional . For wider boxes, specify the multiplier. For example, a multiplier of 1.5 means the new width will be 1.5 times the original width for boxes that have more colors than the numberOfColorsForWiderBoxes threshold. The default value is 1.5. widthMultiplierForGradient . If wider boxes are needed for range as well, specify the multiplier. Otherwise, leave the default value of 1. The original width is generally sufficient for range. verticalLayout . Specify whether legend items should be laid out vertically. This is useful when wider boxes are needed and there are too many legend items to fit correctly horizontally. The default value is false. Examples 1. Conditional with 4 colors (less than the numberOfColorsForWiderBoxes threshold) [ALT Text: A comparison of two column charts labeled "Before" and "After," displaying sales and costs data by sales associates. The "Before" chart shows the "Sales" legend item box in grey despite conditional formatting being applied, while the "After" chart correctly displays the four conditional colors.] 2. Conditional with 11 colors (greater than the numberOfColorsForWiderBoxes threshold, the legend item box width is increased) [ALT Text: A comparison of two scatter charts labeled "Before" and "After," displaying sales and costs data by sales associates. The "Before" chart shows the "Sales" legend item box in blue (the palette's default color) despite conditional formatting being applied, while the "After" chart correctly displays all eleven conditional colors, with a wider box to fit them.] 3. Range Auto (both the min and max colors are auto-selected) [ALT Text: A comparison of bar scatter charts labeled "Before" and "After," displaying sales and costs data by sales associates. The "Before" chart shows the "Sales" legend item box in grey despite automatic range (gradient) being applied, while the "After" chart correctly displays a gradient between the automatically selected minimum and maximum colors.] 4. Range Manual with Min Max range type (both the min and max colors are manually selected) [ALT Text: A comparison of bar scatter charts labeled "Before" and "After," displaying sales and costs data by sales associates. The "Before" chart shows the "Sales" legend item box in grey despite manual range (gradient) with Min/Max mode being applied, while the "After" chart correctly displays a gradient between the user-selected minimum and maximum colors.] 5. Range Manual with Min range type (only the min color is manually selected) [ALT Text: A comparison of bar scatter charts labeled "Before" and "After," displaying sales and costs data by sales associates. The "Before" chart shows the "Sales" legend item box in grey despite manual range (gradient) with Min mode being applied, while the "After" chart correctly displays a gradient between the user-selected minimum color and the automatically selected maximum color.] 6. Range Manual with Max range type (only the max color is manually selected) [ALT Text: A comparison of bar scatter charts labeled "Before" and "After," displaying sales and costs data by sales associates. The "Before" chart shows the "Sales" legend item box in grey despite manual range (gradient) with Max mode being applied, while the "After" chart correctly displays a gradient between the automatically selected minimum color and the user-selected maximum color.]
