Question about dynamic selection with two parents of the same entity

Akrem ABDELHAFIDH · 2025-05-30T09:59:37+00:00

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Hi Community,

I’d like to share a slightly complex use case that might open a discussion on potential improvements or clarifications around how dynamic selections work in Board.

🎯 Context:

I have an entity called Month, which has two parents:

Month of the Year → contains values like January, February, etc.
Year Period → contains values such as Y-1, Y, Y+1 to indicate the year to which the month belongs (Grand parent)

✅ Expected behavior with fixed selection:

When I manually select:

Month of the Year = January
Year Period = Y-1

I correctly get January 2024, which is expected.

❌ Issue with dynamic selection via cube:

However, when I try to reproduce the same logic using dynamic selections from cubes (one cube for Month of the Year and another for Year Period), Board seems to only keep the last applied selection.

That means the cross-filtering between the two parents is not respected, and only the latest parent selected dynamically is taken into account. I assume this is due to some internal logic or priority handling in the selection engine.

🔄 Working workaround:

I’ve found a workaround using a procedure with two steps:

Apply Dynamic selection from cube on Year Period
Apply Dynamic selection from cube on Month of the Year
Use Go To Screen + Apply Selection to Screen

Surprisingly, this allows me to simulate a working dynamic selection across two parents.

Even more interesting: if I copy the selection from the screen where the procedure applied it and paste it into another screen and save, it works both parent are selected dynamically based on cubes .

❓ My questions:

Can this kind of "forced" dynamic selection have any side effects?
Could someone explain more precisely what happens in the backend when multiple parents of the same entity are selected dynamically based on cube ?
If it’s a matter of selection order, could Board consider enhancing this by:
- Respecting the order in which cube-based selections are applied in the same selection pop up?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Akrem

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Bettina Clausen

Why don't you just create a cube for dynamic selection on month level that can be automatically derived from the other two?

Akrem ABDELHAFIDH

Hi @Bettina Clausen

Just to clarify this isn't based on a real-life cube at the month level, but rather a test case I simulated to better understand how Board handles dynamic selections when two parent entities are involved.

Actually, I did face a similar need in a real use case, but not on the Month entity. That experience raised questions for me about how dynamic selections behave when multiple parents are selected, and why the intersection doesn’t work as expected on the screen.

So I decided to simulate this case using time dimensions to better isolate the behavior and understand why it's possible to achieve the desired intersection when using a procedure, but not directly through dynamic screen selection.
And the most surprising part is that once the correct selection is made in the procedure, the copy-paste selection from the screen works perfectly on the another screen

This is more of an exploratory approach to dig into how Board works in the backend and to find potential workarounds.

Best regards,
Akrem