Tableau | How to redirect a user to the current action selected dashboard dynamically
Have you ever been in a situation where you would want to enable a dashboard action say from dashboard 1 to dashboard 3 and also from dashboard 2 to dashboard 3 within a Tableau workbook but on doing so, the dashboard goes haywire when the user navigates directly to the dashboard 2 from dashboard 3?. You thought it right. This is because the first action remains selected in dashboard 3 and hence the user has to go to dashboard 1 and deselect the action selected to not encounter this issue.
You could ask isn’t there any way to tackle this issue by redirecting the user to the dashboard where the current action is selected?
Definitely possible by using a few calculations and parameter actions in Tableau.[Note: Some developers might suggest ‘Revert’ option to reset all filters in a workbook but Revert will reset the entire workbook including both action & quick filters so that the user has to reselect the values in the quick filters every time.]
Follow the steps below to leverage the power of dashboard actions while keeping the dashboard intact. To start with let's consider sample superstore data to demonstrate the solution.
- As a first step, let us make our visualizations ready by creating three dashboards Dashboard 1, Dashboard 2, and Dashboard 3 (drill-down view) with dashboard 1 showing the distinct count of products by category, dashboard 2 showing the distinct count of products by region, and dashboard 3 showing a tabular view with a list of product IDs and its corresponding sales.
2. Next step is to create two filter actions one from dashboard 1 to dashboard 3 and the other from dashboard 2 to dashboard 3 as shown below.
3. Now that we have created the filter actions, let's check what happens if we click on the Furniture category in Dashboard 1. This shows the list of 375 products in dashboard 3. Now, if I navigate from dashboard 3 to dashboard 2 directly and select Central region, I should ideally be seeing the list of 1310 products in dashboard 3. However, since the first filter action remains selected in dashboard 3, it shows only 271 products which is nothing but the count of products when both Furniture and Central are selected.
4. To solve this issue, let us create a parameter ‘Chart Name’ of type String that has ‘Category’ and ‘Region’ as values. This parameter can help us identify from which chart the user is navigating to dashboard 3.
5. Then create two calculated fields ‘Category Text’ and ‘Region Text’ with ‘Category’ and ‘Region’ as values respectively as shown below. Place these fields in detail marks of sheets in dashboard 1 and dashboard 2 respectively.
6. Next step is to create a calculated field ‘Back button’ with value as ‘Back’. This will enable us to navigate to the action-selected dashboard.
7. Then create two more calculated fields ‘Category Back Calculation’ and ‘Region Back Calculation’ as shown below.
8. Now we need to create two sheets one for each chart and name it accordingly. I have created ‘CategoryBack’ and ‘Region Back’ sheets. Then place the ‘Back button’ field in the text mark of both the above sheets.
9. Then add the ‘Category Back Calculation’ and ‘Region Back Calculation’ fields to ‘Category Back’ & ‘Region Back’ sheets respectively as filters and set the value as 1.
10. Next step is to place these two sheets in a horizontal container in dashboard 3.
11. Then create Go To Sheet action from dashboard 3 to dashboard 1 and 2 as shown below.
12. Finally let’s create parameter actions in dashboard 1and dashboard 2 as shown below.
Yay, we cracked it! Now when we click on the Furniture category in dashboard 1 the value ‘Category’ will be passed to parameter ‘Chart Name’ and only Back text from the ‘Category Back’ sheet will appear. On selecting this Back text, the user will be redirected to dashboard 1only since we have created a Go To Sheet action. The user can then deselect the action and navigate to dashboard 2 to get desired results in dashboard 3.
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Thanks for reading!
