Filter context
The automatic filtering that occurs in Power BI is a really awesome feature and is one of the reasons that so many companies are gravitating to this tool. The active relationships that are defined in the data model, and that you learned how to create in the previous chapter, are automatically used by DAX to perform the automatic filtering of calculated measures. This is directly tied to the concept of the filter context. You were introduced to the filter context in the previous chapter. I want to briefly expand on the previous chapter here before discussing the CALCULATE function.
A simple definition of the filter context would be that it is simply anything in your report that is filtering a measure. There are quite a few items that make up the filter context. Let's take a look at a few of them:
- Any attributes on the rows; this includes the different axes in charts.
- Any attributes on the columns.
- Any filters applied by slicers (visual filters); slicers...
