Show data labels for 0 blanks with bidirectional cross filter relationship

[stillgull]

I have a clustered column chart visual to show how often tickets are created (new) and closed over the last 3 months. My visual has data labels on and I need to keep 0's displayed because sometimes activity is sparce and without 0's the visual would be bare and confusing. 

After hours of trial and error, I have FINALLY gotten the 0's to always display. I did this by creating a "Last3Months" table that has 0 placeholders for the otherwise blank categories for those months. It's more or less a 3 month date table that has been joined with my "Tickets" fact table via a full outer join so that I can have an open and close row for each date. The visual is then using sum of "Flag" column for the bars.

ex of Last3Months:

Date		Category		Action No		Flag
1/10/2023		New		null		0
1/10/2023		Closed		null		0
2/10/2023		New		null		0
2/10/2023		Closed		null		0
3/10/2023		New		ABC1		1
3/10/2023		New		ABC2		1
3/10/2023		Closed		null		0
4/10/2023		New		ABC3		1
4/10/2023		Closed		null		0

"Action No" is how all of my tables relate to one another (Red in data model pic)

 
Simplified ex of my data model:

Now my problem is I am trying to have a slicer for the users to filter my visual by "Branch", "Sponsor", and "Owner" (Green in data model pic) but the 0's only display when the cross filter direction is single and flowing from my child table into the parent table. If I make the cross filter direction double I am able to use the slicer but the 0's disapear from the data labels. 

Is it my data model that needs to be fixed or do I need a better method of getting my totals for my visual? 

Any ideas would help and would be greatly appreciated! Thanks all!

[VijayP · Accepted solution]

@stillgull  Technically you should avoid using many to many relations in Power BI as they create ambiguity

[VijayP · Accepted solution]

@stillgull  Technically you should avoid using many to many relations in Power BI as they create ambiguity

[stillgull · Accepted solution]

Thanks @VijayP for your comment! This pushed me in the right direction.

For anyone interested in more details into how I solved this, I ended up taking @VijayP's advice and removed the many:many relationship between my "Last3Months" and "Tickets" tables by creating a static 3 month calendar in between the two tables. By not using "Action No" in this relationship I was able to keep the 0's visisble in my clustered column chart visual.  

I then ran into an issue with the Owner, Sponsor, and Branch slicers not filtering my visual. To fix the silcers, I created addittional relationships between the "Owner" and "Sponsor" tables with single flow direction. For branch, I had to remove Branch from the "Tickets" table so that "Last3Months" could remain removed from it's filter direction to keep 0's intact. I gave Branch it's own table and made the same single flow relationship to "Last3Months" as I did with "Owners" and "Sponsors". 

TLDR; it was the cross filter direction to solve the slicers issue and it was removing the many:many and not using the Action No in the relationship to solve the 0's