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Feature Motivation

We at Explo have observed that our clients frequently have a natural parent-child hierarchy among their customer entities that they wish to depict in the Explo Customers tab. For instance, a client may have customers that are sports leagues, with each league comprising various teams, and each team having multiple players. This scenario presents a natural three-tier hierarchy: League, Team, and Player. Similarly, many of our clients work with companies that have individual users, resulting in a natural two-tier hierarchy of Customer and User. Explo can accommodate up to three layers of any desired hierarchy.

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Configurable Dashboard Sections and Customer Hierarchy

In most scenarios, we anticipate that customers will employ a two-tier Customer and User hierarchy when activating Configurable Dashboard Sections. This is primarily because you may want the dashboards to have data populated from the Customer level, but have special state saved for each entity at the User level. For instance, if you want Alice and Bob, users within Generic Company, to have their own individually configured dashboards, you must designate Generic Company as the parent customer and Alice and Bob as the children. Subsequently, in your dashboard queries, you should reference the variables from the Customer level. When embedding, it should be done at the User level so Alice and Bob can have their own unique views.

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Filtering on the Frontend by Hierarchy Level

On the frontend interface, selecting a customer will filter the customer page accordingly. You can set the hierarchy level and any parent-child relationships on this customer page as well.

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Feature Functionality

The customer hierarchy feature currently provides two key functionalities:
  1. Referencing any ancestor customer entity in a query by utilizing the inherited archetype variables. You can read more about those here.
  2. Automatically inheriting properties from the parent. For example, in a three-tier hierarchy of sports leagues, if the conference property is assigned as Eastern at the top level, each child and grandchild (‘Team’ and ‘Player’) could reference properties.conference, which would yield Eastern for each level of the hierarchy.

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Example Usage in Queries

The following examples will show how you can control which level in the hierarchy provides the data in your queries. Understanding customer-specific variables is a prerequesite for writing these types of queries, and you can read more about those here. Let’s say we have some customer entities with the following setup:
NameProvided IdHierarchy LevelParent Provided IDAvailable Archetype Variables
NBAnbaLeagueNoneleague_id: nba, league_name: NBA
LakerslakersTeamNBAleague_id: nba, league_name: NBA, team_id: lakers , team_name: Lakers
LeBron Jameslebron_jamesPlayerlakersleague_id: nba, league_name: NBA, team_id: lakers , team_name: Lakers, player_id: lebron_james, player_name: LeBron James
RocketsrocketsTeamNBAleague_id: nba, league_name: NBA, team_id: rockets , team_name: Rockets
Jalen Greenjalen_greenPlayerrocketsleague_id: nba, league_name: NBA, team_id: rockets , team_name: Rockets, player_id: jalen_green, player_name: Jalen Green
If we wanted to show league-level data, 
SELECT *
FROM Table_1
WHERE 1=1
[[AND league_column = {{ league_id }}]]
For the query above, if you viewed an Explo dashboard as any of the customer entities in the table, you’d be able to see all of the NBA data since all of the listed customer entities have NBA as an ancestor. If we wanted to show team-level data, 
SELECT *
FROM Table_1
WHERE 1=1
[[AND league_column = {{ league_id }}]]
[[AND team_column = {{ team_id }}]]
For the query above, if you viewed an Explo dashboard as Lakers you’d be able to see all of the Lakers data. If you viewed the dashboard as LeBron James, you’d also be able to see the all Lakers data because LeBron is a member of the Lakers team. If we wanted to show player-level data, 
SELECT *
FROM Table_1
WHERE 1=1
[[AND league_column = {{ league_id }}]]
[[AND team_column = {{ team_id }}]]
[[AND player_column = {{ player_id }}]]
If you viewed the dashboard as LeBron James, you’d be able to see all of LeBron’s data. If you viewed the dashboard as Jalen Green, you’d only be able to see Jalen’s data. Referencing an inherited property 
SELECT *
FROM Table_1
WHERE 1=1
[[AND column = {{properties.inherited_property}}]]