Case Study
You have prepared a report that aggregates the most important product insights across several pages, with easy-to-analyze charts and tables. In order to empower other users in your organization, you have made a parameter available to allow them to define the scope of products to include on the page. The problem you are facing is that the full list of products is very long. Your data includes product segmentation, which groups the products that should be compared together, yet the users struggle to find those products when analyzing the long dropdown.
Here you can see a long list of the variety of models that were narrowed down by adding the Segment of the new car variable to the Filters area.
In this step, you can see that the Model family of the new car will be parameterized. Which can be done by right-clicking the variable you want to parameterize and selecting this option from the menu.
Here you can see that on the list of available parameters, there are a lot of models that might not be relevant to your analysis. Instead of manually selecting each specific model, you can create a parameter dependency, which will be explained in detail in the next point of this article.
Parameter Dependency
Halo Reports now includes an option to define parent-child relationships between report parameters. As the report author, you will be able to decide that values available within the parameter should be filtered out based on the value of one (or more) other parameter(s). In the particular case discussed here, an additional parameter based on the existing segmentation variable could significantly reduce the friction in the report. Once a dependency between a list of products and the segment is established, only the products belonging to the selected segment will be available in the product dropdown.
Here you can see where the dependency can be created. Under the three-line menu in the Manage parameters section, you will have the Filter by option where the dependency can be established.
At this point, you can see in the Parameters section on the right side that there are fewer options when it comes to models. It is easier to continue the analysis without the clutter that is created if you have an unfiltered list.
One parameter can have multiple dependencies (for example, the list of products could be filtered by the segment AND the brand), and the dependencies can also include multiple levels of nesting (for example, a high-level categorization can filter out the list of available segments, followed by segment selection filtering out the list of available products).
In this screenshot, you can see that multiple dependencies can be created.
Once you establish multiple dependencies, it will be reflected in the Parameters section on the drop-down list with models.
Additional Details
In order to be able to establish the parameter dependency, there are certain conditions that need to be met:
Parameters need to be question-based. At the moment, creating dependencies for parameters based on a manually-provided list of values is not supported.
Parameters need to be based on questions derived from the same study.
Parameters cannot be actively in use in the existing dependency tree to ensure no circular references appear. This means you will not be able to set a parameter as “parent” if it is already (grand)parent or (grand)child of the one you want to change.
If you have changed the settings of some of your parameters so that a change in their values does not apply automatically to all their occurrences in the report, it won’t be possible to set a “local” parameter as a parent for a “global” parameter.
Changing the parent parameter will update the list of values available in the child parameter(s). As a result, preexisting selections might become unavailable. Halo Reports will try to keep any overlapping values whenever possible, and in case none exist, some default selections will be applied instead.