Dynamic Change of Dimension using Google Data Studio Parameter

At Last Google Data Studio added the option to let the user change the value of parameter, which will make some new scenarios possible, I will try to show some new cases where either it was extremely painful to do, or simply not possible.

In this report, I added some cases where I think it is useful, for this Blog, I will start with a very common scenario

The report Show the Daily Electricity produced in eastern state of Australia, just by Using a slicer, the level of details will change to Region or Technology, or individual Generators

Currently it does not work with parameter in the formula engine,when I tried I got this error ( Nimantha has a solution using Regex which does not require BigQuery, you can see his report here)

Update as 26 August 2020

Riccardo from the dev team suggested a simple workaround,

let’s just create a dummy dimension that take the values from the parameter

( I swear, I first tried this before, but it was not working, anyway calculated field in GDS are still a mystery for me)

now you can use it in your calculation

Alternatively you can used a Custom Query from BigQuery, luckily it is accelerated by BI Engine, so it is fast and use the free 1 GB memory provided by Data Studio

SELECT
*,
CASE
WHEN @detail="Region" THEN Region
WHEN @detail="FuelSourceDescriptor" THEN FuelSourceDescriptor
WHEN @detail="StationName" THEN StationName
WHEN @detail="Technology" THEN Technology
ELSE
NULL
END
AS Level_detail
FROM
datastudio.today_view_MT

then you added the values to the parameter, notice, you can’t have a list of values from a data source, you have to manually type the values.

now the column “Level_detail” will dynamically switch to column “Technology”, “Region” etc based on the selected value in the parameter Detail

now you add the Parameter “detail” to a filter control, notice Parameter are color code Pink, a nice visual clue !!

now you use your dynamic column in a visual

and here is the final results

Personally I think it is a game changer for Data Studio, specially when you combine it with the Power of BI Engine, interesting time ahead