Hi, today I want to talk about inactive relationships. Those relationships with the dashed line that unless you invoque them with USERELATIONSHIP they do nothing. The thing is a common pattern if you read this blog — let’s say you have a retail model, and for some charts you need to use the order date and in other charts the delivery date. Other than that measures are the same, such as Sales amount, total cost, margin etc. Well, you could do a copy of each of the measures and wrap it in a CALCULATE( … USERELATIONSHIP(… ) ) or do a calculation group. Today we’ll do that, with style.
Sometimes we face models which can’t be built because we fall into the circular relationship (which Power BI protects us against) or ambiguity (which sits there silently making all our results meaningless). I faced one of this situations the other day at work and found a workaround with –you guessed it– a calculation group.
This is one problem that you don’t realize it’s a problem until you face it.
Happened to me designing a P&L report. For this report, an arbitrary list of items (arbitrary to me of course) has to be displayed in certain order, each with it’s own arbitrary calculation, and even with some hierarchy indentation. Easier said than done, really.