Expose Card Visual Reference Values to DAX via SELECTEDREFERENCEVALUE() or similar
Description
The new Card visual introduces Reference Values and Reference Labels, which are excellent for displaying targets, benchmarks, prior periods, and other contextual metrics alongside a KPI.
However, these reference values currently exist only at the visual layer and are not accessible from DAX.
It would be extremely valuable if Power BI exposed the active reference value through a DAX function such as:
SELECTEDREFERENCEVALUE()
or a similar mechanism that returns the reference value configured for the current visual context.
Need
Many semantic models use Calculation Groups to dynamically apply comparisons such as:
- Variance to Target
- Variance %
- Variance to Budget
- Variance to Previous Year
- KPI status indicators
- Dynamic conditional formatting
Today, developers often need to create separate target/reference measures solely to support calculations, even when the same value is already configured as a Reference Value in the Card visual.
This leads to:
- Increased measure proliferation
- More maintenance overhead
- Duplicated business logic
- Larger and more complex semantic models
Example
Suppose a Card visual shows:
- Value: Sales
- Reference Value: Budget
A calculation group item could then leverage:
VAR RefValue = SELECTEDREFERENCEVALUE()
RETURN
DIVIDE(SELECTEDMEASURE() - RefValue, RefValue)
Without requiring dedicated variance measures for every KPI.
Benefits
Reduce the number of measures required in enterprise models.
Improve reuse of Calculation Groups.
Enable more generic KPI frameworks.
Keep visual configuration and calculations aligned.
Simplify maintenance for large semantic models.
Alternative Enhancement
If exposing visual-level reference values directly is not feasible, another option would be to allow Calculation Groups or DAX expressions to access visual metadata through a dedicated API or context function.
