Beauty of UI-based Faceting!
Tableau CRM (TCRM) came out with an ingenious solution to make faceting easy for us a few releases ago! Why do we call it beauty you may ask. Imagine a dashboard with 6 charts associated from the same dataset. In addition to this, the dashboard also contains multiple listselectors. When we do this, any filter action performed on any of the listselectors affects ALL charts. But, we don’t want that to happen. We want only one chart to filter by 2 listselectors with no affect to the other 3 charts. Before the UI based faceting came into the realm of TCRM, this was possible only using bindings/interactions. Now, we don’t need that any longer. We can simply select which chart/listselector interacts with what! How cool is that.
UI Based Faceting in Work
We go to our usual Chicago Taxi dataset and create a new dashboard with 6 charts (These could be other widgets as well like tables, number widgets etc.) and a few listselectors/range filters.
Currently, this dashboard Facets all Charts with all the Filters associated.
When we edit the dashboard and click on any widget. Then go to the Properties under the Widget Pane, we see Faceting which reads All.
This is where the magic is! All, we do is click on the caret next to All under Faceting and select one of the scenarios.
The ideal way to Facet IMO is to use Exclude and select which widgets (charts and other listselectors/ranges in our case) we want this to NOT facet with. To do this click include and then Choose Queries.
In our case, we will exclude ALL charts except the one we want to Include. And we will turn all the listselectors and range widget Faceting to None so that they don’t facet with each other. Thus, we are excluding all widgets except the Company Listselector and the Trip Miles by Company chart and the date widget. We need to perform this on all the remaining charts as well for it to work correctly. Otherwise, if the other charts/widgets have Facet All selected, the charts will facet even though we have asked the first chart to exclude it from Faceting. In the example below, Trip Total by Company and Trip Total by Pick Up Community Area have been faceted to exclude the other non-relevant charts. Notice that When we select a few Companies from the Company Listselector, it does not affect Trip Total by Community Area but affects all others. Yet, the Date Widget Facets to All Charts.
Now we will do the same Faceting with the rest of the charts.
More about Faceting can be found in the Salesforce Documentation on Faceting.
To learn how to do Faceting using SAQL, you can refer Rikke Hovgaard’s Blog on this.
