Scenario
You’re database contains a list of all your customers and their annual sales figures. You’re users need to be able to see the sales figures but you want restrict who can see the company names to staff in your Finance department.
Solution
User Variables will allow you to change what each of them can see at an individual user level. In the following example, we made a change at object level in Data Connections that will display asterisks instead of the Customer Name when this object is used on the dashboard.
We then used a Variable for one user that will display the Customer Name in full when they use the same object on the dashboard.
Process
The steps below show how we achieved this:
Step1
At Object level in Data Connections we need to add a CASE statement that will hide all Customer Names. Once we’ve done this in the Data Connection we can then add a Variable at individual user level that will let certain users see the detail.
The following screenshot shows how we did this, we also added an Order by field for the Customer ID field.
In this example, if OBFUSCATE is ‘No’ then all Customer Names will be displayed. However, if OBFUSCATE is ‘Yes’ then asterisks will be displayed.
Step 2
We then added a Custom Variable on the Dashboard Configuration> Settings tab that will prevent all users from seeing the Customer Name.
The following screenshot shows how we did this. The Variable of OBFUSCATE with the value of ‘Yes’ has been added.
Step 3
For all users that we want to see the Customer Name, we added a User Variable.
In the following screenshot, you can see that we added the Variable of OBFUSCATE with the value of ‘No’.
When users with the Variable of OBFUSCATE and value of No log into the dashboard they will see full details.
When users with the Variable of OBFUSCATE and value of Yes log into the dashboard they will see the following.