Create a dimension in Business Context

A dimension is what you break a number down by — product, region, month, price band. Measures give you the figures; dimensions give you the ways of slicing them.

There are three kinds, and they're built differently, so this article covers each in turn.

Before you start: open a semantic layer and go to Business Context → Dimensions.

Every kind starts the same way — click Create and pick one.

Tip: before building from scratch, try Suggestions — Astrato reads your model and proposes dimensions from the columns already there. See Get suggestions from your data.

The straightforward one: a column from your model, exposed as something people can group by.

Step 1: Choose Create → Field dimension.

Step 2: Give it a Name — this is what people will see, so use the business word rather than the column name.

Step 3: Add a Description if it needs one.

Step 4: Under Field binding, choose the column it comes from. The list is grouped by table, with a search box for larger models, and each entry shows its data type.

Step 5: Choose a Format if the values need one — dates and numbers usually do. It appears as a chip you can remove again.

Step 6: Click Create.

A drill-through is a path — a set of dimensions in order, so someone can start at the top level and step down into detail. Region to country to city, say, or category to subcategory to product.

Step 1: Choose Create → Drill-through.

Step 2: Name it for the journey rather than any one level — Product hierarchy rather than Category.

Step 3: Click Add and pick the first level.

Step 4: Keep adding levels. The order matters — it's the order people will travel through, from broadest to narrowest.

Step 5: Click Create.

A bucket groups a continuous number into bands: age groups, price brackets, order-size tiers. It turns a column of numbers into a handful of readable categories.

Step 1: Choose Create → Bucket.

Step 2: Name it and describe it.

Step 3: Pick the Source field — the number you want banded.

Step 4: Choose a Format for how the band labels appear. Each option shows you a live example, so you can see the result before choosing. No format uses the raw value, and Custom format is there if none of the presets fit.

Step 5: Set the Distribution — the Min value and Max value the bands should span.

Check your bands before you commit. Use Show distribution to see how many rows land in each band. If nearly everything piles into the first bar, your ranges don't match your data and the dimension won't tell anyone much.

Step 6: Click Create.

Your dimension appears in the list with its source underneath — here 1 Sales › Orderdatekey — along with when it was last changed and by whom.

The toolbar above works like the one on Measures: search by name, filter by type, and Group by type when the list grows.

The ⋮ menu on each row offers the same four actions as a measure:

Show in lineage is the useful one. It opens the graph with your dimension highlighted and everything unrelated faded out, so you can see at a glance which table and field it rests on. Clear returns the graph to normal.

Nothing is created until you click Create, and Cancel backs out cleanly.

A new dimension goes into your working copy. It doesn't reach anyone else's workbooks until you publish, and it's undoable through version history — see How versioning works in the semantic layer.

Tip: name a version before adding several dimensions at once. It gives you one clean point to return to if the set isn't what you wanted.