Invisible filters and disappearing values

[Babedgy]

Hello dear community,

I have to say I'm going a little bit cray cray over here. Since the latest Updates my Power BI Desktop is doing a lot of things that it shouldnt and isn't doing things that I want.

Following szenario:

I have 3 tables:

1. DIM_Items
2. Salestable
3. Calendartable 

Follwing relationships between the tables:

DIM_Items to Salestable:
itemnr - itemnr

Calendartable to Salestable:
Date - Invoicedate (active)
Date - Startdate (inactive)
Date - Enddate (inactive)

There is no connection between the DIM_Item and Calendartable. There is also NO Datecolumn in the DIM_Item table.

When I now put two Slicers on one Page:

1. Year out of Calendartable
2. Itemname out of DIM_Items

Something very strange happens:
If I dont select any year, I can choose any Itemname out of the other slicer. As soon as I select a year a lot of the Itemnames are removed from the Slicer seletion. Why? I really dont understand.

The Itemnames that I checked did make sales in the selected years, so even if by some kind of magic the filter from calendar - salestable is passed on to DIM_items it still wouldnt make any sense to remove those Itemnames.

I've seen this error since the last update or even the one before quite a bit and I can only solve it by kicking the DIM_Tables completly and get all the information into the fact table (in this case Salestable) and use the slicers from here. Since I build a pretty big datamodel I do need the DIM_tables tho so another Solution would be much appreciated.


Also I found that Power BI suddenly put invisible Filters on visuals. If I build a page for example and show a card for which I put the Filter that only a certain amount of Itemnames should be part of the calculation everything is fine. As soon as I copy the card (because I like the design and want to rebuild same size and looks on another page), the Itemnames filter is also taken to the other page BUT invisble. So I cannot remove the Itemnames filter because the filter pane doesnt even show me that the filter is applied. So its suddenly invisible which makes everything so much harder because I suddenly have to look out for invisible filter contexts which is pretty intense to be honest.

The error that I displayed in the beginning seems to also have an invisible filter issue. So maybe something is off in general when it comes to filters and slicers? Just an idea.

Your help would be much appreciated because the lady is lost, thats for sure.

Thank you guys

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Thanks for sharing the insights with MFelix. I also have the following thoughts:

Hi, @Babedgy 

Date - Startdate (inactive)
Date - Enddate (inactive)
Inactive relationships do not affect options between slicers. It only takes effect if you use the measure Userelationship. Here's a discussion of why your other slicer is affected. 

If your relationship is unidirectional, as shown in the following figure, the slicer between the two DIM tables will not be affected. Unless, there are other conditions outside of you (such as metrics) that interfere with these slicers

If your relationship is bidirectional, then the dimension table is filtered by the fact table. The fact table is filtered by another dimension table.
To put it simply, the date table filter is passed to the sales table, and then the corresponding data is filtered out. Since the sales and items tables are bidirectional and can filter each other, sales passes the filter results of the previous step to the item table.

I've provided the PBIX file used this time below.

Best Regards

Jianpeng Li

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[MFelix]

Hi @Babedgy ,

Not sure how the rest of your model is setup but I'm not able to replicate the issue you are describing about the slicer the only way I can do it is using a bidireccional filter between related tables in this case between Dim Items and Sales table.

However there was a couple of changes in terms of the filter concept please check the link below of the latest update

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-october-2024-feature-summary/#post-28196-_Toc17945...

Not sure if this will help.

Concerning the question about the hidden filter I would suggest that you  make the copy+paste on the original page remove the filter that you don't want and then copy over to the other page, also I can't reproduce this error when copying cards from one page to the othe I'm able to do the removal of the filters is available, even if it's for a new report that does not have that column.

Another option is to use the new Power BI Developer format that allows you to store the PBIX in text format and then edit it using a text editor and you can then remove that specific filter you no problems because you are going to the code itself.