| Announced on | Calculations will stop working |
| May 30, 2023 | July 10, 2023 |
On July 10, 2023, the following Explore calculations will no longer be supported and will stop working:
- Top/bottom attribute
- Fixed calculated metric
- What if variable
- Time comparison metric
On the same day, some incorrectly configured standard calculated metrics and attributes will no longer work and will need to be reconfigured by users.
If you’re using one of these calculation types, or if some of your standard calculation formulas are misconfigured, read this announcement to understand how to fix the formulas and keep your reports working correctly.
This announcement contains the following topics:
- What’s changing and why?
- Will this change affect my account?
- What do I need to do?
- How can I achieve a similar functionality as the legacy calculations?
What’s changing and why?
We’re working to make data exploration more efficient and intuitive in Explore. One of the steps on this journey is to provide better formula-writing guardrails and remove calculations that don’t provide enough value to our users.
Formula-writing guardrails
Currently, Explore doesn’t fully enforce correct formula syntax when users create a calculated metric or attribute. So, users can unintentionally write an incorrectly constructed formula and Explore will execute the calculation, potentially resulting in incomplete results and longer report loading times.
To address this issue, we’re releasing a new, enhanced formula validator that warns users about incorrectly configured calculations. The warning messages are returned to users in real time as they write or edit calculation formulas, preventing them from saving incorrectly configured calculations and resulting in more accurate and faster reports.
On July 10, 2023, some reports with incorrectly configured formulas will stop working, and an error message will be displayed instead.
Legacy calculations removal
Some of the calculations that are available today are used very rarely because they are complex to use and slow to load. Only 0.003% of all Explore reports use such calculations, which include:
- Top/bottom attribute
- Fixed calculated metric
- Time comparison metric
- What if variable
Additionally, these calculations are based on a legacy technology that is reaching its end of life in September 2023.
On July 10, 2023, reports that use one of the calculations above will stop working, and an error message will be displayed instead. Creating the legacy calculations will no longer be allowed.
Will this change affect my account?
If your account has incorrectly configured calculation formulas that cannot be executed or one of the legacy calculations that are due to be removed, you’ll see a new Updates required category in your reports library. All recently used reports that are affected by this update will be listed in this category.
What do I need to do?
Review the reports listed in the Updates required category and update them by fixing the incorrectly configured formulas or removing the legacy calculations. When you access these reports, you’ll see an error message at the bottom of the page that provides more information about why the report needs to be updated.
If you’ll be removing the legacy calculations, make sure that you remove them from the report and the dataset. If one misconfigured calculation is used in multiple reports, fixing it fixes all reports it’s used in.
How can I achieve a similar functionality as the legacy calculations?
- Incorrectly configured formulas: for advice on fixing calculation formulas see Troubleshooting errors in Explore formulas.
- Top/bottom attribute: In the majority of cases, you can use a top/bottom filter to achieve the same results. To learn more, see Creating a top/bottom filter. In the demo below, the top/bottom attribute is replaced by a top/bottom filter to generate an identical report:
- Fixed calculated metric: You can use the ATTRIBUTE_FIX function for fixing your metric to a specific attribute, and you can also use it for fixing a metric overall. See Working with aggregation-level functions. In the demo below, the fixed calculated metric is replaced by a standard calculated metric that is not getting sliced by the attributes placed in the report:
- Time comparison metric: While there is no equivalent feature, a date range metric, result manipulation, or simply creating two reports placed next to each other in a dashboard will help to achieve your reporting goal. In the demo below, the time comparison metric is replaced by a date range metric to generate an identical report:
- What if variable: This can be easily replaced by a result metric calculation, which you can use to adjust the report results. See Using result metric calculations.
Questions or feedback?
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or create a new post or comment in our user community.
35 Comments
Mark Nino Valencia & Holly please reach out to our support team and we will investigate this issue.
I keep getting an error on my reports that I need to update but there is no "updates required" section but the page keeps erroring
Something with this change has gone awry.
This error about invalid calculations is coming up across all our dashboards - some of these reports are literally just the default # Tickets metric with a filter for created date on the dashboard. None of them are using the deprecated functions and most aren't even using custom formulas.
Fiddling with filters sometimes has it load properly, or sometimes we just refresh and pray, which would indicate that it's not the error displayed causing the issue, if it were, we'd expect it to replicate consistently.
We've cleared cache and session data several times to no effect. Would love it if Engineering/Product could take a second look at this change. It's one thing to deprecate features, it's another to break basic functions that don't use those features.
This error about invalid calculations that Dan R. references above is coming up for us too. Today it's occurring on the CSAT tab of the main Support dashboard....
Hi Dan R. & Heather,
This will require a thorough investigation. If the issue is still happening, I suggest reaching out to Support so we can investigate the issue further. Thanks!
Please sign in to leave a comment.