Drillthrough and apply filter on multiple pages

[Wouter1]

I have a central page from where I drillthrough to a page for a specific country. However, there is not enough room for all the visuals on a single page. I would like to be able to click from the the first page through to the second page, while maintaing the filter from the drillthrough.

Example:

From the main page, I drillthrough on a France. The destination page is now filtered on France. From here I would like to go to the next page but that page should also be filtered on France.

Is this possible?

[dk_dk · Accepted solution]

Hi @Wouter1  - I believe I have a solution for you that provides a good user experience as well.

Bookmarks!

In your scenario you would have two pages: the Main page (drillthrough source - country selection) and a Target page.

Set up drillthrough between Main and Target as normal.

On the Target page:

First you can build the "first page" of visuals like you would. Once it is done, open the Selection and Bookmarks panes from the view tab. In the Selection pane, you can group all the "first page" visuals into one group. Then hide the entire group. Now you have a blank canvas again and you can build the "second page" of your drillthrough target (still on Target page). Group the visuals, hide them. Repeat as many times as you need. If you have visuals that are constant, as in you want the same thing to show on all "pages" you can group them separately (for example a logo, nav buttons or a card with the country name).

In the end, the selection pane would look something like this:

• Constants (content for all pages)
• Page1 Content (visuals grouped)
• Page2 Content (visuals grouped)
• etc...

Now for the solution:

Hide all the groups in the Selection pane except Constants and Page1 Content. In the bookmarks pane click Add. Hide Page1 Content, unhide Page2 Content, Add bookmark. Repeat for however many "pages" you have.

Important: On each of the bookmarks you need to click the 3 dots next to them and remove the tick from "Data" (keep "Display" and "Current page") - this is to make sure that the bookmarks work with the drillthrough properly.

With all the bookmarks set up, you can now add nav buttons to the Constants group and set the action on them to navigate to a specific bookmark.

Because the bookmarks are set up in a way that only one "page" is shown for any given bookmark, you will get the impression that you are navigating across multiple pages with different visuals, while in fact you stay always on the Target page (and you are essentially just batch hiding - unhiding visuals with the buttons).

This worked for my use case perfectly, hope it works for you too! Please let me know if you have any questions, I will try to help.

[TomasHamrak]

Thanks so much, it works also for me and my situation with more bookmarks and hidden visuals.

[JamesGS]

@dk_dk Fantastic.  Thanks for this, works a treat.

[AllisonKennedy]

@dk_dk Great solution!

I also just had an idea - you could just extend the page size - set it to 'custom' and increase the height so users can scroll to the 'second page' of visuals. 

[AllisonKennedy]

https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=bf0d573a-0c56-48f8-ad45-aa68409ce3d0

Not exactly the same, but this idea might help with the user experience. 

Otherwise I'm currently using a Treemap visual as the 'button' to workaround (similar to the table solution described earlier, but I find the treemap is a bit more visually appealing). Still annoying to have to right click though. 

[Pragati11]

Hi @Wouter1 ,

Yes this is possible in Power BI. You can use drillthrough buttons to achieve this.

See link below that explains how you can achieve this:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/desktop-drill-through-buttons

https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/create-a-drill-through-button-in-power-bi/

Thanks,

Pragati

[avatorl]

@Pragati11 

I believe @Wouter1 knows how to create drill throug buttons.  But the problem is to open one more page (Page 2) with the same drill through filters that have been applied to Page 1 (after drilling through from Page 0 to Page 1). We can add drill through button to Page 1, but it will be disabled by default. Use has to select a country (despite there is only one country) on the Page 1 to enable drill through button that opens Page 2.  DAX can be used to add additional conditons for button enabling, but how we can make the button enabled by default?

I think drill through page should bring additional insights for the main page, it shouldn't take a user into a long journay between multiple pages. So, let user to drill through from Page 0 to either Page 1 or Page 2 and if he need more details let him go back to Page 0 to select another drill through option if he really needs it. But if you believe that in most cases a user will need to see both Page 1 and Page 2 then use synced slicers instead. 

[Sreya]

@avatorl How shall I set synced filter value by clicking a grid value. I have 3 pages, I need to drill down from Page1 to Page2 and then Page3, but there is no clickable attribute in Page2, user wants us to just pass selected attribute value to page2 and page3, here I face the challenge, how shall I drill from page2 to page3 as there is no required clickable attribute in page2. If synced filter is an option then how shall I set the synced filter value by clicking a grid value in page1 as drill will be from selection of grid value?

[v-jiascu-msft]

Hi @Wouter1,

Yes, it's possible. You can create another Drill through table. Then you can drill through to another table from a drill through table. For instance: from main table, drill through to the second table with filter France. and then from the second table drill through to the third table with filter France. Please give it a try.

Best Regards,

Dale

[Sreya]

@v-jiascu-msft Can you please futher explain, what is drill through table and how to achieve this nested drill through functionality.

[Sreya]

@Wouter1 Did you get workaround of it? Can you please share. I need to have this functionality.

[avatorl]

1) it will work if you have a table with Country column on Page 1. a user will need to right click on the country name (there will be only one), select drill through -> Page 2.

Not perfect from user experience point of view.

2) it will work with drill through button, but user will need to (left) click on the country name. despite there is only one country in the table drill through button will be disabled by default and user has to click on the country name to enable the button. 

Not perfect from user experience point of view.

3) Use synced filters on all 3 pages (filter on page 1 and page 2 can be hidden) and simple navigation buttons.

A woraround, not perfect, not for all possible cases.