Field parameter behaviour

[adnyk]

Hi all, 

I have been using Field Parameters for a while now and really love the flexibility an possibillities that comes with it but recently in a project we discovered a strange behaviour and don't know if it is supposed to work like this or not. I will try to explain with some screenshots and will also add a pbix (link) for you to try it out.

I have a fieldparameter with columns from 2 different tables and within the parameter grouped those columns into 3 groups, "Geography", "Product" and "All":

Field Parameter = {
    ("City", NAMEOF('Geography'[City]), 0, "Geography", 1),
    ("Country", NAMEOF('Geography'[Country]), 1, "Geography", 1),
    ("District", NAMEOF('Geography'[District]), 2, "Geography", 1),
    ("Region", NAMEOF('Geography'[Region]), 3, "Geography", 1),
    ("State", NAMEOF('Geography'[State]), 4, "Geography", 1),
    ("Category", NAMEOF('Product'[Category]), 5, "Product", 2),
    ("Segment", NAMEOF('Product'[Segment]), 6, "Product", 2),
    ("Product", NAMEOF('Product'[Product]), 7, "Product", 2),
    ("City", NAMEOF('Geography'[City]), 8, "All", 3),
    ("Country", NAMEOF('Geography'[Country]), 9, "All", 3),
    ("District", NAMEOF('Geography'[District]), 10, "All", 3),
    ("Region", NAMEOF('Geography'[Region]), 11, "All", 3),
    ("State", NAMEOF('Geography'[State]), 12, "All", 3),
    ("Category", NAMEOF('Product'[Category]), 13, "All", 3),
    ("Segment", NAMEOF('Product'[Segment]), 14, "All", 3),
    ("Product", NAMEOF('Product'[Product]), 15, "All", 3)
}

When using the field paramater in a matrix and having a slicer with hierarcy Group -> fields we can dynamically select the hierarchy in the matrix (awsome right! 🙂 ) by the order we select columns in the slicer. 

But when selecting from different groups, we can only go 1 level down after selecting columns from different levels: 

Left: 1, 2, 3 works fine
Right: adding 4 and the order of columns in the matrix is switched to be 1, 3, 2, 4. 

Trying the same order but from "All" group and order is 1,2,3,4: 

Has anyone here discovered or seen this before? Are there any documentation on fieldparameter behaviour that explains why it works this way or do any of you super users out there have an educated guess on this? 🙂

Thank you for your time! 

[lbendlin]

Kudos for pushing Field Parameters over the bleeding edge - your use of parameters 4 and 5 is undocumented.

You may want to read this article Fields parameters in Power BI - SQLBI  and then check the queries produced by your visual in both scenarios.

Generally you want to avoid duplicating the data in a visual (in your case the "All"  dimension). See attached.