Filters and re-usability for Indicators

Support - Assistance technique
1

Dear all,

in my current approach for feeding DHIS2 with data from a source system, I rely
heavily on Categories / CategoryCombinations as dimensions for a DataSet (E.g.
DataElement: NumberOfBalls, Dimension: Color of Balls[red,blue,green]). From a
data-modelling perspective this is much more flexible than creating single
dataelements RedBalls, GreenBalls and BlueBalls, as I can easily add other
colors and maybe also a material dimenesion in the future.

However, this only makes sense, when I can make use of the dimensions later on,
especially when defining indicators. So far I have only seen indicators that can
be calculated from simple DataElements.

What I'd actually need would be indicators, that can
a) filter dataElements according to dimension values. Example: Indicator
IND_RedBalls = NumberOfBalls where(Color=red)
b) be re-used in subsequent indidator definitions. Example: IND_Redishness =
IND_RedBalls / (IND_GreenBalls + IND_Blueballs)
During analysis (e.g. pivot-table) a) must be applied when selecting data before
aggregation, b) must be applied after aggregation (I think someone was asking
for this last year)

I can't figure out how to do that with the current indicator manager. If it is
possible, can someone please suggest a solution? If it is not possible - is
there a chance to get a blue-print through with this, if I wrote one?

Thanks a lot,

Uwe

2

Hi Uwe,

I agree very much that it would be very useful to be able to auto-generate indicators that respect the dimensions, although that would only work if you have exactly one DE involved (or if the DE had exactly the same dimension/catcombo - but then not even in all cases). From one point of view, you could expect the framework to just generate up all the possible combinations, but that could result in a lot of pretty useless ones, so probably best to be able to ask for them explicitly, but in a much simpler way than you would have to do currently. The key question is then what implications this will have for the Analytics engine (and to a lesser extent, for the user interface).

Knut

···

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 9:08 AM, Uwe Wahser uwe@wahser.de wrote:

Dear all,

in my current approach for feeding DHIS2 with data from a source system, I rely

heavily on Categories / CategoryCombinations as dimensions for a DataSet (E.g.

DataElement: NumberOfBalls, Dimension: Color of Balls[red,blue,green]). From a

data-modelling perspective this is much more flexible than creating single

dataelements RedBalls, GreenBalls and BlueBalls, as I can easily add other

colors and maybe also a material dimenesion in the future.

However, this only makes sense, when I can make use of the dimensions later on,

especially when defining indicators. So far I have only seen indicators that can

be calculated from simple DataElements.

What I’d actually need would be indicators, that can

a) filter dataElements according to dimension values. Example: Indicator

IND_RedBalls = NumberOfBalls where(Color=red)

b) be re-used in subsequent indidator definitions. Example: IND_Redishness =

IND_RedBalls / (IND_GreenBalls + IND_Blueballs)

During analysis (e.g. pivot-table) a) must be applied when selecting data before

aggregation, b) must be applied after aggregation (I think someone was asking

for this last year)

I can’t figure out how to do that with the current indicator manager. If it is

possible, can someone please suggest a solution? If it is not possible - is

there a chance to get a blue-print through with this, if I wrote one?

Thanks a lot,

Uwe

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Knut Staring

Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo

Norway: +4791880522

Skype: knutstar

http://dhis2.org