Posts Tagged ‘Hierarchy’

Parent-Child Hierarchies with multiple parents in Power BI with Power Query

I’ve written about a method to dynamically flatten parent-child-hierarchies also with multiple parents some while ago here. I’ve actually used this approach for Bill-of-materials cases and refined that approach in a series starting here. There, the quantities are aggregated in M already, as they are not supposed to change. But if one wants to use the hierarchical structure to report on transaction tables where several filters shall be applied, one has to adjust the data model a bit:

DimNodes

If you have parent-child-hierarchy with multiple parents, my function will a table like below, where the children with multiple parents still reside in different rows:

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Dynamically flatten Parent-Child Hierarchies in DAX and PowerBI

If you use DAX to flatten Parent-Child hierarchies you will end up with a table that has a static number of columns (like described here). If you need a dynamic solution instead, which creates just as many level-columns as there are needed for the current data, you can use DAX’s helper-tool Power Query (or Get Data in Excel) or the query-editor in PowerBI, which uses the language M.

Another advantage of this solution is that you can script the table creation in one step (only flaw: You still need to manually adjust your hierarchy though): But it saves time in creating the table, especially if you have many levels.

Update 2017-Dec-2: It also handles multiple parents now.

2 simple steps

  1. copy the following function,
  2. add a new step to your current table where you call this function, filling in the following parameters:
    • table name (which is the name of the previous step in your M-query)
    • name of the column with the child-key
    • name of the column with the parent-key
    • name of the column who’s values shall be shown in the levels (can also be child-key)

 

Call fnFlattenPCHierarchyFunction

 

And this is the code:

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