I know, it’s a terrible title, but it’s the best I could come up with. This blog post is to explain a workaround for a behavior I detected while playing with a field parameter (all measures) and a stacked column chart. The problem is as follows: If you have more than one measure in the chart, you can define a color for each measure and all works fine. However, if you filter your field parameter table in a way that only one measure is used in the chart, then that color is ignored and you get a default color. What’s even worse is that the same color will be used whenever a single measure is included, so you can’t even configure it again to get the right color. Fighting the same issue? Keep reading!
I realize that I use the word «arbitrary» a lot on my blog posts, but then I think, «so what?». Anyway, this blog post is mostly a remake on another blog post, the one called «A truly dynamic tooltip«. When I wrote that blog post, I had struggled a lot to get the effect I wanted, but even though I learned a lot in the process I ended up convinced that it was better to stay out of calculation groups when building such a chart. Well, this is no more. Calculation groups, are ususal, are just fine. You just need to know how to use them.