"(Blank)" in Card Visual For 0 Count

[nickelcap]

Hi Everyone,

I'm not sure if I encountered a bug or if I'm doing something incorrectly. I put together a card visual that provides a count of the assets that meet a certain set of criteria. I'm using three columns for the visual: "Asset", "Colour Formatting", and "Latest". "Asset" provides the asset name; "Colour Formatting" reports a 0, 1 or 2 based on certain criteria; and "Latest" finds the latest time stamp for each asset. If that's not clear, here's a snippet of the data:

And here's a snippet of the set up for the visual:

The count is set as Count (Distinct). Now, the filters I'm applying will mean that there will be 0 assets in the count (I know this by manually checking), but it shows '(Blank)' in the card. I know this set up works because I'm using something very similar for another count, the only difference being that Colour Formatting is set as 2. Is there a workaround for this?

Thanks,

Dan

[Anonymous]

Ya, this is the "by design" behavior.  Taking a sum of a "no rows" returns a blank, not zero.  Same with distinctcount etc.

I would just write a custom measure:

  My Distinct Count := DISTICTCOUNT(MyTable[MyColumn]) + 0

The +0 will obviously have no impact on any "valid" result, but Blank + 0 will be 0, and should give you what you want.