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Using LINKs & Text in Result Metric Calculations

  • December 5, 2022
  • 2 replies
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Jozef11

Hello,

I'm trying to figure out why I'm unable to return LINKs or text in Result Metric Calculations. Numbers may be output, but text and LINKs are prohibited.

Not sure if this is a bug or intended functionality, so I'll write as though it's a bug but provide a Use Case just in case.

Use Case

In this photo, the return values on the "Visual" Result Metric Calculation should return either "Interest" or "Not of Interest" according to another fields value. This photo is being re-used from another request, so pretend that [Velocity] is any other number that you can only obtain from two metrics.

This is not possible to create, however, if the text outputs are changed to 1 and 2, there are no issue. With some experimenting I found that text outputs are prohibited, and as are LINKs.

 

      2 replies

      Dave24
      • Dave24
      • December 6, 2022

      Hi @jozef11 -

      A key difference between metrics and attributes is that metrics are always quantifiable, so they do need to be numeric (see the first paragraph of Using metrics and attributes in reports). The documentation on using result metric calculations could perhaps make this more clear, but in Explore, the description does specify that result metric calculations do create a new metric in the report: 

      I think what you'd want to do is create a standard calculated attribute instead -- then you can add that as a Column in your report, which definitely can be text: Getting started with custom metrics and attributes 

      Jozef11
      • Jozef11
      • Author
      • December 7, 2022

      Thank you for the info!

      Unfortunately an Attribute will not work for my use case, because the text should indicate something regarding the count of tickets rather than each individual.

      I guess ultimately the problem doesn't necessarily lie with Result Metric Calculations, but with the fact that I have no way of reporting on full metric counts within Attributes or using text in Metrics, since both would resolve the issue.

      A simpler example of my use case would be if each ticket had one product type, perhaps "Apples", "Oranges", or "Bananas". I might have a report with two metrics, the total number of each product type last month and the month before.

      This is possible currently, but lets take it a step further and say I'd like some sort of visual indicator in tickets related to product movement over a month. If there are less than 100 tickets that's great; if there are 101 - 500 tickets that's to be expected, but if there are more than 500 tickets something unusual may be happening.

      Although I can calculate the difference, I can't show this last column as an indicator using a Metric or Attribute if I'm reporting on the totals rather than counts of tickets and want to use text or photo indicators. If I use values like 1, 2, and 3, that's fine, but I can't do "Low", "Med", and "High".

      Further, rather than text indicators, it would be nice to hyperlink a colored ball like is possible on the Attributes right now. See the photo below for an example - this is not possible on Result Metric Calculations.

      It would be nice to have more flexibility there to better visualize relationships between ticket activity and certain pre-set thresholds.

       

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