In November 2023, Microsoft added a new preview feature to Power BI – Field Parameters. Since then, I have found this to be one of the most used features when creating reports. But like any new feature added to Power BI, it feels like they settled at 90% completion, with the other 10% either being too hard or out of scope for whatever reason.
In this article, I’m going to go over some of the workarounds to get the other 10% we all need.
Creating field parameters
This is pretty easy to achieve. From the Modelling ribbon select New parameter then Fields and choose the fields you want from the UI.
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You can select from measures and columns or any combination of the 2 if you really want to be daring. Note that if you want to dynamically show a measure, you do need to use implicitly calculated measures as I have done below. Selecting a Numeric field won’t automatically aggregate as it would if you included it manually in a visual.
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You’re now good to go. You can now create visuals that dynamically change depending on the users selection:
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Dynamically changing and filtering dimensions with field parameters
Now lets look at some more advanced uses for Field Parameters. Lets say you want to allow a user to dynamically change the dimension they can view, but also filter on that dimension to focus the visual on a particular data point.
We’ll create the field parameter as we did above, this time selecting the dimensions we want to display instead of the measures:
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Since we’ve selected the option of Add slicer to this page, Power BI will automatically create a slicer with these dimensions, as it did when we created field parameter with measures.
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We’ll now duplicate this slicer and in the field well of the duplicated slicer, right-click on the field name and select Show values of selected field
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We can now add the field parameter to a visual to dynamically switch what the users sees in real time.
How to get the selected value of a field parameter
This is something that should be much easier than what it is. There may be cases when you want to calculate a measure based on what parameter value is selected. The typical way to do this, is to use a SWITCH / IF statement around a SELECTEDVALUE statement.
Parameter Financials Dimensions = {
("Product", NAMEOF('financials'[Product]), 0),
("Segment", NAMEOF('financials'[Segment]), 1)
}
Doing so, unfortunately leads to the following error:
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At first, this had me perplexed. Why couldn’t I do this? An online search didn’t explain the why, but I did find a solution that involved using relatively complex aggregations to get around it. But there is a much easier way. Create a new column like this:
Label = 'Parameter Financials Dimensions'[Parameter Financials Dimensions]
I now have a new column in my parameter table that references the dimension name. I can now use this new column in my measures without the dreaded composite key error:
SelectedParameter =
SWITCH(SELECTEDVALUE('Parameter Financials Dimensions'[Label]),
"Product", 1, // Solve our product issues
"Segment", 2 // Solve the worlds issues
)
And best of all, no more errors!
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One more advanced field parameter hack
There’s another hack I have used to get more functionality out of field parameters. I won’t go into detail of this due to my current time constraints but may revisit this sometime in the future:
Create multiple field parameter tables and join them via an overarching Reference table to allow you to update multiple visuals at once
I don’t use this very often, but I have found it useful when I need multiple dynamic values from a single user selection.