What’s Coming in Violin Plot 1.2.0
It’s time for another update to the Violin Plot custom visual for Power BI! The visual has been updated in AppSource but will take up to a couple of weeks for Microsoft to do their compatibility testing and for the updated visual to appear in your reports.
2019/04/11: this is now live
In the meantime, here’s a run-down of the stuff you might be interested in for when this does go live:
Bug Fixes
Frank Thonsen reported a particularly nasty problem with zeros getting treated as NULL in the visual and its aggregations in some cases. Due to this issue I’ve opted to release earlier than intended, so some features have been bumped at the cost of improved data quality. Apologies if you’ve been affected by this particular issue.
Show Data Hotkey Support
Meagan Longoria recently provided a very nice write-up of the visual, and made several great suggestions for improving things. One of these is enabling the Alt + Shift + F11 shortcut to trigger the Show data menu option and this has been added.
Improved Tooltip Support
Power BI Desktop (March 2019) introduced improved tooltip formatting options. We recently saw the introduction of report page tooltips as well. Changes have been applied to the visual to support these features and make tooltip formatting consistent with core visuals.
This has resulted in some minor changes for the end-user:
- The Tooltip menu now contains all core tooltip formatting options, i.e. it’s the standard Power BI Tooltip menu that you see in the core visuals.
- You can specify a report page tooltip to be used by the visual — providing your measure is set up with one — or use the default tooltip.
- Options for configuring specific data points and aggregates have been retained, but the menu is now named Default Tooltip Details. Under the hood, this is the same set of properties, so anything you’ve configured in any of your visuals to date will carry over to the new version.
Why two Different Menus?
Power BI custom visuals can’t access the property states of the inbuilt menus as they aren’t provided to any routines. While we can add custom properties to these menus, it’s difficult to control their behaviour based on the standard properties.
For instance, switching the Tooltip toggle to OFF will grey out the core properties but not the custom ones we’ve introduced. Therefore, I’ve kept the toggles and default tooltip-specific configuration in this separate property menu.
Culture-Awareness & Formatting for Measures
The visual was previously coded to only support the en-US locale, meaning that if you had applied locale-specific measures to your visuals then this would not be handled as intended. We were also limited to sharing the measure format from the data model between the Y-axis and the tooltip, which was not always ideal. Features to improve these were on the roadmap but got brought forward a bit due to feedback (thanks again to both Meagan and Frank for flagging).
This update will yield measure formatting to the Power BI locale you’re using as well as your data model, meaning that locale-specific formatting should be observed, e.g.:
These changes will also be present in the default tooltip.
There may well be situations where you want to display different levels of precision to your tooltip values (for example, formatting the Y-axis to display whole numbers, but specifying decimal places in the tooltip for the values surrounding measures.
The Default Tooltip Details menu now has the following additional properties:
- The # Samples properties allow you to format the number used to display this particular data point (particularly useful if this is in the thousands but your measure values are not).
- The Measure display units will apply the specified units & decimal places to the remaining values in the tooltip.
Here’s an example of everything configured a bit differently, just for visual confirmation:
Thanks for your continued feedback, and I hope that these additional features and fixes continue to give you a lovely violin-y experience :)
