During a consulting day with one of our clients, I found an interesting case related to dashboard actions and groups. The requirement was very simple:
“I want to have a first dashboard with several maps where all the different regions in various levels of detail are presented. Then by clicking one of these regions I would like to see the second dashboard including only the countries of this region. Please note the following:
- A country can be a member of several regions across the various levels
- There are multiple data sources.”
Confidentiality doesn’t allow me to share the client’s exact case and data but I replicated the problem using the EU Superstore dataset which is installed with Tableau Desktop!
CREATING THE COMPONENTS
Firstly, I imported my data source three times and then built a map based on each data source. I grouped the countries of each map in different ways and the result was the following groups:
- 1st data source: EU countries and non-EU countries.
- 2nd data source: Big regions; Scandinavia; Central and Northwest; Mediterranean
- 3rd data source: Small regions; United Kingdom & Ireland; France; Iberia etc.
/1st worksheet/
/2nd worksheet/
/3rd worksheet/
Afterwards I put all the worksheets together in a dashboard called Source Dashboard:
/Source Dashboard/
Secondly, I quickly created a new worksheet under the name Profit & Sales Analysis and a new dashboard called Target Dashboard. I used the 3rd data source for this worksheet.
/Profit & Sales worksheet/
/Target Dashboard/
The next step is to create the interactivity between the 2 dashboards. In Tableau, this is something easy to implement using dashboard actions. I chose a Filter Action since the requirement indicated that only the relevant countries should be included in the second dashboard after clicking on a region in the first dashboard.
/Actions Overview/
The details of a filter action (i.e. worksheet) are shown below:
PROBLEM
Here is where this case gets interesting. The interactivity is not working as we expected for the EU & non-EU map and the Big regions map:
RESOLUTION
Here is where this case gets interesting. The interactivity is not working as we expected for the EU & non-EU map and the Big regions map:
The reason is very simple: The EU & non-EU map and the Big regions map are built based on the 1st and 2nd data source accordingly while the Profit & Sales Analysis worksheet is built based on the 3rd data source. The result is that the Country (EU and non-EU) and Country (big regions) groups are NOT included in the 3rd data source. Therefore, when we click on an element of these custom groups Tableau can’t match it with an element of the 3rd data source where our second dashboard is based on.
We can easily fix this situation by simply Copy-Pasting all groups from the data sources of the source dashboard to the data source(s) of the target dashboard!
Now the interactivity between the dashboards is working perfectly:
Please don’t hesitate to leave your comment in the section below!