Sharing Data Roles

About Shared Data Roles

If your graph object contains multiple graph elements, you can specify that some data roles be shared across two or more graph elements. You share data roles when you want the graph elements to use the same data role for either of their axes. When report designers who use the graph object in their reports assign roles, a single data column is assigned to all roles that use the shared role.

Note: If the graph element types are compatible, overlaid graph elements are automatically assigned a shared role. (See Incompatible Graph Elements.) You can unshare a role if needed.

Shared roles are very useful in user-defined lattices. They enable you to manage data roles across columns and rows. For example, you might share data roles if you want to analyze relationships in your data.

In this example, the X axis of the scatter plot shares a role with the Measure axis of the bar chart.

When the graph object is used in the designer, the data might be applied as shown in the following example.

The bar chart shows engine sizes for different regions of the world. (The engine size has been changed from a Sum to an Average measure.) The scatter plot shows the miles-per-gallon trend for the different engine sizes.

Two graph elements with a shared role in the designer

Share or Unshare a Data Role

To share a data role, on the Role Definitions tab, click the menu down arrow

next to the role that you want to share. Select Create Shared Role With Another Role and then select the name of a role.

You can also click Add Shared Role, and then create and share the data role.

To unshare a data role, click the menu down arrow

next to the shared role, and select Unshare.