Combining Object Swapping with Category Objects

Owned by Karen Hogan (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Sept 09, 2022
3 min read

Our article on Object Swapping explains how you can create an object that you can use to change the values on an X (or Y) Axis. In this example we take it one step further and use objects to change the Legend and X and Y Axis combined with an object that filters the data in the chart.

Instructions

If you want to create this in your own dashboard, follow the instructions below and substitute the objects with the information you want to view:

  1. In Dashboard Configuration>Data Connections, create the following objects in the Dashboard Repos connection:

    For each object we’re using the COLS.DISPLAY_NAME object and in the WHERE clause, we’ve specified the columns that we want to be available for users to swap between. In the Legend example, we’ve used the values Payment Method, Fraud and Sales Year which all come from our Retail data connection.

  2. In the Retail data connection we then created the following objects, this is an example of the Legend object:

    We called this object ‘Swap Legend’ but you can call it whatever you want. The ‘Select’ statement for this object refers back to the object that we created in Dashboard Repos called ‘Legend’.

  3. In Dashboard Configuration>Categories add the objects that you created in Dashboard Repos:

    The ticks for ‘Can Select All’ and ‘Filter’ have been removed for all the objects that we want to use in Object Swapping. The only object that users can filter on is the ‘Store Name’

  4. We then build a chart that contains the objects we created in our Retail data connection:

  5. When users select an object in Category Objects, in the following example we’ve chosen an item from the Legend, they will see the columns that you entered in the WHERE clause in Dashboard Repos:

  6. After clicking the ‘Apply’ button, the Legend will swap to show the new selection and the chart will be updated:

  7. As a final step, to make the Axis and Legend labels more meaningful to users, we used Object Replacement in the label fields on the Attributes screen: