Hierarchies in Analytics

Some prebuilt, standard subject areas include hierarchies, such as a customer or territory hierarchy. When you design analytics with a hierarchy, users can drill up and down that hierarchy to view data grouped at different levels.

For example, with a territory hierarchy, users can drill up and down their data to look at information grouped by region, state, and city. Hierarchies are delivered with standard subject areas only; you can't add them to custom subject areas. What you can do, however, is join your custom subject area with a standard subject area that has the hierarchy you need. This lets you create analytics with a hierarchy using data pulled from your custom subject area.

Supported Hierarchies

The following hierarchies are supported in some standard subject areas, such as Sales - CRM Pipeline:

• Resource

• Territory

• Customer

• Partner

Example of Adding a Hierarchy to Analytics

If you want to create analytics that include a hierarchy, and also pull data from a custom subject area, then here's how you do it.

Let's say you have a custom object named Ticket that you want to report on. The Ticket object includes the Account field as a dynamic choice list. This means at runtime, your users can create tickets and assign accounts (customers) to them.

Now you have 1,000 tickets in your database and it's time to report on them. Your users would like to view total number of tickets up and down their customer hierarchy.

Here's how you can create a report to meet this need:

1. Create a custom subject area for Ticket and publish it.

2. Create a report using a standard subject area, such as Sales - CRM Customer or Contacts Real Time. These subject areas include the customer hierarchy.

3. Add the account hierarchy from the subject area to your report.

4. Next, add your Ticket custom subject area to the report. This "joins" the two subject areas.

5. Finally, add the metric, such as Number of Tickets, from the custom subject area to your report.