Complex Filter Conditions In Power BI Reports Using Visual-Level Filters And Measures

While Power BI has a lot of great functionality for filtering the data that appears in a visual using visual-level filters there are going to be situations where you need more control over how filtering works, and in this blog post I’m going to show you how you can use visual-level filters and measures in combination to achieve this. The example I show here may be quite specific but I think the general technique has a lot of other interesting applications.

Let’s say you have a table containing customer purchases, with potentially more than one purchase per customer, and want to display a table in Power BI showing only the most recent purchase for each customer relative to a given date.

Using data from the Adventure Works DW database, here’s the Internet Sales table from my Power BI example dataset that contains the customer purchases. Each purchase has a Sales Order Number and a Sales Order Line Number, and there may be multiple line items in a single sales order.

Here’s some data from this table, filtered down to show the purchases of one customer: Abby Subram.

[Note: all dates shown are in dd/mm/yyyy format]

The requirement is that the report user should be able to select a date in a slicer and show the details for the most recent sales order that occurs before the selected date. So, for example, if the user selects 1/1/2003 then no rows should appear; if 16/6/2003 is selected then only SO50934 should appear; if 30/9/2003 is selected only the four rows relating to SO54975 (and not SO50934) should appear; if 28/6/2004 is selected only the four rows relating to SO73938 should appear, and so on.

The first step is to create a create a date table that contains the ‘as of’ dates the user can select from, using the disconnected slicer technique: basically a date table that has no relationship at all to the Internet Sales table shown above.

Next comes the tricky part. Visual-level filters can be used to filter the contents of visuals in a Power BI report based on the value of a measure, and that measure does not need to be displayed in a report. What you therefore have to do is create a measure that will return the value 1 for data that should be displayed (in this case, the most recent purchase order for the customer) and blank otherwise, then apply a visual-level filter using this measure and filter on this measure equalling 1. Marco and Alberto have a great article going into the details of how measures behave when they are used in visual-level filters here that I recommend you read before carrying on.

For this particular scenario here’s my measure:

The logic here is:

• Assume that this measure will be used to filter a table visual in a Power BI report, where each row in the table visual displays data from a single row in the Internet Sales table in the dataset.
• For each row in the Internet Sales table, find the current values for OrderDateKey and CustomerKey, as well as the date selected in the ‘as of date’ slicer, and store them in variables
• Create a table of all possible combinations of CustomerKey and OrderDateKey ignoring the current filter context, then filter it so you get all the sales orders for the current customer and where the order date is greater than the date of the current sales order and less than or equal to the selected ‘as of’ date. This is stored in the SameCustomerSOs variable.
• If there are rows in the SameCustomerSOs table then the current row in Internet Sales should not be displayed because it is not the most recent sales order as of the selected date; if SameCustomerSOs is empty then the current row should be displayed, because there are not later sales orders for the current customer before the selected as of date.
• Finally, return 1 if SameCustomerSOs is blank and if the current row in Internet Sales has an order date before the selected as of date.

You can then create a table (or some other visual) in your Power BI report and, in the visual-level filters for that table, drag in the measure and apply a filter on the value of the measure equalling 1:

Here’s the result, showing the data for Abby Subram:

The one thing you do need to be careful of when using this technique is that the DAX you use in your measure must be as efficient as possible: inefficient DAX, complex filters and large data volumes will make your report unusably slow. I’m sure the DAX used in my measure above could be tuned to perform better (it currently takes around half a second to filter the full 60,000 rows in the Internet Sales table; Power BI only queries for and displays 500 rows at a time, which makes things faster) but the real point I wanted to make here is that using measures and visual-level filters in this way allows you to apply almost any complex filter condition you want to the data displayed in a visual.

You can download the sample pbix file for this post here.