Select a column by parameter

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I am new to Power BI and exploring the dashboard. I have created a measure to calculate the cumulative value.

Cumulative Freezer=
CALCULATE (
    SUM ( 'Business Plan'[Freezer] ),
    FILTER (
        ALL ( 'Business Plan'[Period] ),
        'Business Plan'[Period] <= MAX ( 'Business Plan'[Period] )
    )
)

However, I want to make the chart more dynamic, like through a parameter selection I will get different cumulative value from different column.

But it seems that DAX doesn't have a function like "colnames" which allow me to pass dynamtic column to SUM function.

Can anyone help me with it? Thank you very much.

[GilbertQ]

Hi @Anonymous

You cannot pass a column name into a DAX measure as far as I am aware. 

You can pass values within a column to a DAX measure though.

Do you have an example of what you are trying to achieve?

[Anonymous]

Here is a sample of my data. So far I created a measure for column "Freezer".

Cumulative Freezer=
CALCULATE (
    SUM ( 'Business Plan'[Freezer] ),
    FILTER (
        ALL ( 'Business Plan'[Period] ),
        'Business Plan'[Period] <= MAX ( 'Business Plan'[Period] )
    )
)

I hope that I can have different measure for different columns using parameter or other method so that I do not need to create new measure for every single column. A sample chart is below:

[GilbertQ]

Hi @Anonymous

It appears that you could use the disconnected slicers option in which you might have to create a few measures, but for the end user they can click on a slicer and it will change dynamically for them?

https://www.fourmoo.com/2017/08/08/power-bi-how-disconnected-slicers-can-enrich-transform-your-analytics-data/

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the disconnected slicer information. But I think the main difference is that I hope to filter by columns but the disconnected slicer filters data by rows. Still thanks for your information.

[Eric_Zhang · Accepted solution]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks for the disconnected slicer information. But I think the main difference is that I hope to filter by columns but the disconnected slicer filters data by rows. Still thanks for your information.

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@Anonymous

In my opinion, a better practice for your case is to unpivot the columns and slice the unpivoted column.

If the way in your original post is still preferable, you could try to create measure as

Cumulative Freezer =
SWITCH (
    TRUE (),
    HASONEVALUE ( ParameterTable[Parameter] )
        && ISFILTERED ( ParameterTable[Parameter] )
        && LASTNONBLANK ( ParameterTable[Parameter], "" ) = "Freezer", CALCULATE (
        SUM ( 'Business Plan'[Freezer] ),
        FILTER (
            ALL ( 'Business Plan'[Period] ),
            'Business Plan'[Period] <= MAX ( 'Business Plan'[Period] )
        )
    ),
    HASONEVALUE ( ParameterTable[Parameter] )
        && ISFILTERED ( ParameterTable[Parameter] )
        && LASTNONBLANK ( ParameterTable[Parameter], "" ) = "Washing machine", CALCULATE (
        SUM ( 'Business Plan'[Washing machine] ),
        FILTER (
            ALL ( 'Business Plan'[Period] ),
            'Business Plan'[Period] <= MAX ( 'Business Plan'[Period] )
        )
    ),
    0
)

[Anonymous]

Thank you! I think unpivot columns are suitable for my case and thank you for the code I will also try!