› Metrics › Define metrics › Standard metric › Define a standard metric › Set the purpose

Set the purpose

Any field moved to the right column as a record needs to have its purpose designated in the Property Panel. When a purpose is set for a field, the icon associated with the field is changed.

  1. Open the Property Panel by clicking the pin icon on the right side of the screen.
  2. In the Record column, click the name of the field to set the purpose for.
  3. Find the Purpose section in the Property Panel and click in the corresponding box to open a drop-down menu; then select the purpose of the field as Dimension, Time, Value, or Weight.

    The Value purpose must be defined in a metric.

    Dimensions are the fields that define and determine how a user can drill down or break down a metric. Dimensions are typically fields where you group the results against each value of the field (customer, branch, sales person, city) and not fields where the value is unique for each record (price, recordID, asset value, address). The more dimensions and dimension values you have, the more rows of data there are in the Data mart.

    Since these dimension fields are visible to the dashboard users, we recommend that you assign meaningful names to them.

Assign an alias to a dimension field

  1. Open the Property Panel.
  2. In the Record column, click the name of the field to set the alias for.
  3. From within the Property Panel, find the box that shows the Display Name and click the name to change it. Press Enter or click outside the box when finished.