Configure Input Controls in Analytic Applications

You can configure input controls to change which dimension members to display for widgets in analytic applications without scripting.

About Input Controls

Input control is a dimension member filter that enables you to change which dimension members to display for the widgets in your analytic application. You can also do further settings to configure your input control, such as:

  • turning on or off cascading effect

    When you turn on the cascading effect of an input control, any value selection changes you make to it will affect related input controls from the same data source.

  • creating linked analysis

    With linked analysis, input controls can be applied to any widgets you include in the analysis.

Note

Currently supported widgets are chart, table, R visualization, geo map and value driver tree.

Create Input Controls

Create an input control to allow widgets to display specific dimension members in your analytic application.

Procedure

  1. From the Insert area of the toolbar, select Start of the navigation path Next navigation step End of the navigation pathInput Control.

    You’ll see that a filter is added to your canvas.

  2. Select the filter. From the dropdown menu, select Dimensions.
  3. Choose one of the dimensions from the list.
  4. In the dialog, select the members or range to be included in the input control.

    For time-based dimensions, you can either choose Filter by Member or Filter by Range to set the input control.

    For more information about input control settings, you can refer to Step 6 to Step 10 on Applying a Story or Page Filter.

  5. Select OK.

Results

You’ve created an input control. By default all the widgets from the same data source will display any selected dimension members in the input control. You can further use linked analysis to modify the widgets affected by filtering. For more information, see Create Linked Analyses in Analytic Applications.

From (More Actions) on the input control, you can select Edit Input Control to change the dimension members. To change the display information of the input control, select Display As and choose one of the options: Description, ID and Description and ID.

Turn on Cascading Effects

You can turn on cascading effect for specific input controls, so that any value selection changes in one input control will affect others from the same data source and vice versa.

Prerequisites

All the input controls related to the cascading effect must come from the same data source.

Context

By default the cascading effect is on for all input controls.

With the cascading effect on for multiple input controls, you can make them affect each other in your application. For example, if you have both Country and Region filters, and you change the Country filter value from All to Sweden, the Region filter will be updated to show only regions within Sweden while all other region names are hidden.

Procedure

  1. Select the input control.
  2. On the Builder panel, select an interaction option:
    Option Description
    All Input Controls from This Data Source (default option) Any value selection changes you make to this input control will affect all the input controls from the same data source and vice versa.
    Only Selected Input Controls

    Any value selection changes you make to this input control will affect only specific input controls from the same data source and vice versa.

    • Select Input Controls: Select the input controls to be affected by changes in this input control.
    • Automatically Connect Newly Created Input Controls: Apply cascading effect to any newly added input controls from the same data source.
  3. Select Designer to close the panel.

Results

You’ve created the cascading effect. Any value selection changes made to this input control will simultaneously update other ones depending on the interaction option you’ve selected. To display hidden values in the affected input controls, select Show Inactive Values on them.

From (More Actions) on the input control, you can turn off the cascading effect. When there’s no checkmark next to Cascading Effect, any changes made to this input control won’t affect others or vice versa.

Note

At design time, cascading effect won't be applied to any input controls in popups.