Similar to how your data lives in Cube, analytics 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.
To determine the dimension level and hierarchy, numbers are assigned to each dimension level, and then the list is organized by top-level 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 top-level dimension, Account, 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 structuring of columns will be proper for all the top-level dimensions in your dimensional 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
For example, say we’re building a question that shows Revenue Actuals over time. Every Cube has a different hierarchy, so this example may not match your data structure exactly, but will highlight how to locate dimensions.
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:
To further limit the data in this question to a particular scenario, a second filter is added for Scenario. We’ll select Actuals after selecting Scenario 1.
When filtering with dimensions, you can keep your Cube Web portal 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 dimensions.
Use data from dimensions in multiple levels
If you want to include data from multiple accounts, scenarios, departments, etc., in your question, you can select multiple dimensions in your filter.
This is straightforward if your dimensions 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.