Similar to how your data lives in Cube, dashboards use your data hierarchy to make values accessible when building questions. When constructing a question, you’ll filter or pull data to visualize using your dimensions and structure.
Numbers are assigned to each dimension level to determine the level and hierarchy, and then the list is organized by dimension.
Learn more about how Cube stores and organizes your data.
Match your Cube hierarchy with your dashboard hierarchy
You can match your Cube dimension hierarchy with the view of your hierarchy when building dashboards by flattening it into levels. For example, suppose your Account dimension has the following dimensions and hierarchy:
Account
- Income Statement
- Revenue
- Cost of Goods Sold
- Operating Expenses
- Personnel Expenses
- Sales & Marketing
- Other Income (Expenses)
- Balance Sheet
- Assets
- Current Assets
- Fixed Assets
- Intangible Assets
- Liabilities & Equity
- Liabilities
- Equity
- Assets
In the dashboard Builder, these dimensions would be flattened and organized under:
| Account 1 | Account 2 | Account 3 |
| Income Statement | Revenue | |
| Income Statement | Cost of Goods Sold | |
| Income Statement | Operating Expenses | Personnel Expenses |
| Income Statement | Operating Expenses | Sales & Marketing |
| Income Statement | Other Income | |
| Balance Sheet | Assets | Current Assets |
| Balance Sheet | Assets | Fixed Assets |
| Balance Sheet | Assets | Intangible Assets |
| Balance Sheet | Liabilities & Equity | Liabilities |
| Balance Sheet | Liabilities & Equity | Equity |
The same column structuring will be applied for all dimensions in your hierarchy (Department, Scenario, etc.).
Preview the data structure
You can see this when you open the preview of your filtered data, so you can confirm the data you’re filtering is what you want to use in this question. This preview outlines your hierarchy as seen by the dashboard builder.
Example
Every Cube has a different hierarchy, so this example may not match your data structure exactly, but it will highlight how to locate dimensions.
For example, say we’re building a question that shows Revenue Actuals over time. In our dimensional hierarchy, Revenue is two levels deep, so we select Account 2 in the filter column:
Then check Revenue, and click Add filter:
A second filter is added to further limit the data in this question to a particular scenario. After selecting Scenario 1, we’ll select Actuals.
When filtering with dimensions, you can keep your Cube Workspace open in another tab to quickly determine your hierarchy level or develop the habit of previewing the data you’re filtering to ensure you’ve selected the appropriate dimension members.
Use data from dimensions at multiple levels
You can select multiple dimension members in your filter to include data from multiple accounts, scenarios, departments, etc., in your question.
This is straightforward if your dimension members are at the same hierarchical level. For example, when building a question that visualizes Revenue and Net Income, and both of these Accounts are at Account 2, select them both in the filter.
However, filtering data at multiple levels will always bring in the data corresponding to the lowest level of data in the filter.
To build a question that includes data at multiple levels, pull in the highest level of data and use the summarize by or group by fields to display the data. This will likely involve using custom expressions to summarize data correctly.
For example, if I wanted to visualize sales and marketing expenses excluding sales commission, I would need to filter to the parent account (Account 3 - Sales & Marketing) to pull in all data.
Then, build a custom expression to calculate the total.
Learn more about building dashboards or creating questions.