Business Calculation (Legacy)

Important Notice

Starting April 19, 2024, Business Calculation will no longer be supported for new user signups and will only be available for legacy use cases.

We recommend switching to AQL Expression, which offers enhanced functionality.

Knowledge Checkpoint

A grasp of these concepts will help you understand this documentation better:

• Dataset field types: Dimensions and Measures
• Holistics Expression

What is Business Calculation

Business Calculation is one type of the custom fields in Holistics computed on the result-set from your exploration activities.

When you create a Business Calculation, you are essentially creating a new field (or column) in your current report, the values of which are determined by a calculation that you control. This new field is saved to your report and can be used to create more robust visualizations. But don't worry: your data in the original data warehouse and modeling layer remains untouched.

Business Calculation is based on the mechanism and concept of Holistics Expression. Please refer to the doc for more information.

You can use calculated fields for many, many reasons. Some examples might include:

• Calculation Ratio between 2 columns (like Excel)
• Aggregate Data quickly
• Filter result (apply both for dimension and measures)

Business Calculation is different from other fields

There are some major differences between Business Calculation and Model Field Expression

• Business Calculation can be created by anyone who has at least explore permission (especially Explorers), as opposed to Model Field Expression where creators need to have permission to manage the modeling layer and have a thorough understanding of the company's modeling structure
• A Business Calculation can only be used inside a specific report where it's created while Model Field Expression can be reused across reports or datasets that contain the field's model.
• Business Calculations operate on the result-set of the exploration activities (where relationship among models is not stricly involved) while Model Field Expressions is calculated inside its models (and requires modeling relationships if it involves fields in different models).

Create Business Calculation

Note

Please note that in order to use Business Calculation in any datasets or reports, you need to at least have EXPLORE permission in those datasets or reports.

In Exploration View (when you're exploring dataset or report), just simply click on +Add Field in Visualization Panel and select +Add Business Calculation

After that, you need to fill in Field Label and the Syntax/Expression to create the Calculation. The syntax of Business Calculation is based on Holistics Expression

Some notes

Business Calculation currently does not support cross model calculation unless fields used in the syntax are aggregated

For example:

• We support sum(model1.field_a) + sum(model2.field_b)
• But DO NOT support sum(model1.field_a + model2.field_b)