How to create a Continuous custom Date Hierarchy?

[Anonymous]

Then automatic date hierarchy created by Power BI is always continuous meaning that if you drill down to month-level in a line chart you can still use e.g. the Forecasting-feature. But when I create a date hierarchy on my own I can't manage to keep it continuous when drilling down. Instead it automatically switches to Categorical, and then e.g. Forecasting won't work. I've tried all kinds of different ways of creating the hierarchy (e.g. using "Month" = MONTH( [Date] ) or "Month" = FORMAT ( [Date], "MMMM" ) but this doesn't seem to help maintaining a coninuous drill-down. 

This image illustrates the difference. The problem occurs on the date hierarchy I've created myself (left) where I can't drill down and keep the X-axis as Continous. But it works on the hierarchy Power BI has created automatically using the date-column (right).

[Ghuiles]

Hi! @krconrad  was right. The SQBI Team published an article on this issue.

Here it is: https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/improving-temporal-line-charts-in-power-bi-with-dax/

As always, it is interesting.

Enjoy.

G.

[krconrad · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous and @pbit,

I asked a similar question in a comment thread on SQLBI. Link here: http://disq.us/p/28db3dz

Marco Russo responded with an answer, and it sounds like they're publishing an article about it soon. I'll paste his comment and example below. I hope this helps!

"Power BI uses an internal attribute (data category) that cannot be modified in Power BI.
You can obtain the same behavior by creating columns as dates and formatting them as you want. We will publish an article about this in a few weeks, the principle is using a calculated table like the one below and then set the custom format of the columns using strings as yyyy (year) and mmm yyyy (month year)..."

Date = 
VAR FirstFiscalMonth = 7  -- First month of fiscal year
VAR FirstDayOfWeek = 0    -- 0 = Sunday, 1 = Monday, ...
VAR FirstYear =           -- Customize first year to use
    YEAR ( MIN ( Sales[Order Date]  ))
RETURN
GENERATE (
    FILTER (
        CALENDARAUTO (),
        YEAR ( [Date] ) >= FirstYear
    ),
    VAR Yr = YEAR ( [Date] )             -- Year Number
    VAR Mn = MONTH ( [Date] )            -- Month Number (1-12)
    VAR Qr = QUARTER ( [Date] ) + 1      -- Quarter Number (1-4)
    VAR MnQ = Mn - 3 * (Qr - 1)          -- Month in Quarter (1-3)
    VAR Wd = WEEKDAY ( [Date], 1 ) - 1   -- Week day number (0 = Sunday, 1 = Monday, ...)
    VAR Fyr =                            -- Fiscal Year Number
        YEAR ( DATE ( Yr, Mn + FirstFiscalMonth - 1, 1 ) )
    VAR Fqr =                            -- Fiscal Quarter (string)
        FORMAT ( EOMONTH ( [Date], 1 - FirstFiscalMonth ), "\QQ" )
    RETURN ROW (
        "Year", DATE ( Yr, 12, 31 ),
        "Year Quarter", FORMAT ( [Date], "\QQ-YYYY" ),
        "Year Quarter Date", EOMONTH ( [Date], 3 - MnQ ),
        "Quarter", FORMAT ( [Date], "\QQ" ),
        "Year Month", EOMONTH ( [Date], 0 ),
        "Month", DATE ( 1900, MONTH ( [Date] ), 1 ),
        "Day of Week", DATE ( 1900, 1, 7 + Wd + (7 * (Wd < FirstDayOfWeek)) ),
        "Fiscal Year", DATE ( Fyr, FirstFiscalMonth, 1 ) - 1,
        "Fiscal Year Quarter", "F" & Fqr & "-" & Fyr,
        "Fiscal Year Quarter Date", EOMONTH ( [Date], 3 - MnQ ),
        "Fiscal Quarter", "F" & Fqr
    )
)

[L_D]

I still can't get it working. Can you show me your date hierarchy based on these fields? What am I missing?

My date hierarchy created from custom date table:

My Year field:

My Month field:

[pbit]

Still no solution to this problem? I’m having the same issue.

[kialburg]

Was a solution ever found for this issue? I'm having the exact same problem.

[v-piga-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

By my test with creating a date hierarchy, it could be continuous and the Forecasting will work like below.

You should check if the date you created is a Date type or a text type. The feature Forecast is available for line charts only and the x-axis value needs to have a date/time format or be a uniformly increasing whole number.

In addition, you could have a reference of this article about forcasting.

If you need additional help, please share your data sample so that we could help further investigate on it? You can upload it to OneDrive or Dropbox and post the link here. Do mask sensitive data before uploading.)

Best Regards,

Cherry

[Anonymous]

Thanks Cherry
Do I understand you correctly that your “Dateformat” is a manually created hierarchy using Year, Quarter, Month, Day, which are all whole numbers? If you drill down to month-level, will the x-axis then still be continuous?

[kialburg]

Was a solution ever found for this?

[Anonymous]

I have still not found a solution. Have asked everywhere but no one seem to be aware of this, which is highly surprising as any Line Chart might be affected in an undesirable manner if the X-axis can't be set to Continuous.