[From Wrike] Folders and Projects in Wrike Analyze: Hierarchical Structure 🗂️

Folders and Projects in Wrike Analyze: Hierarchical Structure 🗂️

Hello there! ☺️ 

My name is Herine, I’m the lead Subject Matter Expert of Wrike Analyze in the Support team, and today I’d love to cover one of the most common topics: hierarchy in analytics tables. I apologize in advance, but there’s going to be a lot of text 🤓

You will find this post useful if you:

• Have a widget with projects/folders, and you’re looking for a way to display their parent folders/projects too
• Need to aggregate project values on a parent folder level
• Tried adding Folder Name and Project Name to the same widget and wonder why it shows no data
• Are mastering Wrike Analyze and are looking for some generic tips for the future

This post will:

• Explain how data is linked in Wrike Analyze and why some data dimensions don’t work with each other
• Suggest two different solutions for hierarchy
• Show how you can use Excel and Advanced filters in Wrike Analyze

Tech Background: Data Tables in Wrike Analyze

Let’s begin with the basic concepts in Wrike Analyze. 

It has its own data model (different from BI export or other Wrike features), and all the data there is organized in tables. Every section you see when you’re adding some dimension to your reports represents a separate data table, and each dimension is a column. For example, this is what the Project data table looks like:

Some tables have joints with each other, and that allows adding dimensions from different data tables to the same widget. For example, the table Project is connected with the table Task, and therefore you can add Project Name and Task Name to the same widget to display the tasks nested under those projects.

The table Folder is also connected to the table Task and can work the same way. However, it is not connected to the table Project.

If you add dimensions from the table Folder and the table Project, Wrike Analyze will not understand that their nesting relationship is requested and will be looking for an item that is a project and a folder at the same time. Such items do not exist, and as result the widget will show no results.

However, there is one specific data table that shows all the parental relationships: Include Data From. If you’ve ever created a report, you might have noticed that the dialogue window asks you to choose a source. The selected source is added as a filter to Include Data From, and the report will be pulling data from it.

Since Include Data From is connected to the tables Folder, Project, and Folder/Project, you can use it to display parent items of your subfolders or subprojects.

Levels of hierarchy in Wrike Analyze

If Include Data From is used, you can display three levels of hierarchy in Wrike Analyze:

1. Super parent: space/ parent folder/ parent project
2. Parent: subfolder / subproject
3. Task

Therefore, it is possible to display two types of folders/projects: parent and any folder/project nested under it, and their tasks – three columns in total:

However, it is not possible to show 4 levels: space, then parent folder, then subproject, then task. It is also not possible to show parent tasks and subtasks in different columns.

If more levels are required, the workaround would be custom fields. For example, if I create a custom field “Space” and fill it out in all the projects/folders of the given space, I could show 4 levels. Here’s an example:

1. Column 1 – Folder/Project Custom Field Text Value*
2. Column 2 – Include Data From Name
3. Column 3 – Project Name
4. Column 4 – Task Name

*Custom fields can also be added as dimensions, you can find more insights in my 4-post series on custom fields in Wrike Analyze (post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4).

This approach is probably the best one if you have Wrike Integrate in your subscription plan and can build custom automations, or if you’re experienced in API coding and could build an automation in some external tool. Without custom automations, the custom field solution would imply manual effort. You can mass-populate the field in the Table View: you can fill it out in the item on the top and then drag and fill everything beneath it.

Include Data From: How it works 

List filtering: simple structure

The Include Data From solution is less manual than the custom fields solution, so I’d like to explain it in more detail and show step by step how I built the widget on my first screenshot. Here’s how I built it:

1. Add Include Data From Name (ID)* to Rows of my pivot table
2. Filter it by my parent folders
3. Disable the dashboard Include Data From filter in the widget settings (to avoid the conflict between board and widget filters)
4. Add a filter by Include Data From Depth Level to exclude 0. This is important for the cases when parent and children are of the same type. In my example, some of my parents are projects, and if I don’t exclude the 0 level, they will appear both under Include Data From Name (ID) and Project Name.
   *If you don’t want to see IDs, you can use Include Data From Name instead in Rows. However, I’d still recommend using Include Data From Name (ID) for the filter. There might be duplicates with the same title, but IDs are always unique. If you filter the widget by ID rather than just name, you’ll make sure that your report will not show data from the duplicates (if any).
5. Add Project Name and Task Name.
6. [Optional] If at some point another parent folder is created, I will need to update the filter and add its name as well.

Other use cases

I can use this approach even if I don’t want to display project and folder names together. For example, if I want to show the count of projects in each parent folder, I’d still use Include Data From Name and then just add COUNT([Project ID]) to values:

With Include Data From Name instead of Folder Name, you can aggregate any subproject data on the parent level. For example, my chart below shows average project budget by their parent folders:

Advanced Filtering: complex structure

The solution above is a simple one if there are just a few parent folders, but what if there are a hundred of them? Sure, adding them all manually to a filter does not sound like an easy solution!

Here comes my favorite workaround which includes export to Excel and working with advanced filters:

1. Create a dummy widget (or duplicate the original one) with the same filters as the original widget (meaning project owners, statuses, etc.)
2. Filter Include Data From Name (ID) by the source of the parent folders, for example, the space
3. Filter Include Data From Depth Level by 1 (since I need only the first level of folders)
4. Add *Folder Name to Rows to show the list of the parent folders and projects that I will need in the widget (you can use Folder/Project Name if you need both folders and projects, or Project Name for projects only)
5. Skim through the list to make sure it is correct and export it to Excel
   
6. Go back to the original widget and follow all the steps from the previous guideline above with just one difference: pick just two random items in the Include Data From Name (ID) filter (this step is not required, but it helps to create the script for step 7)
7. Switch to Advanced. Those random projects are now listed in the filter in quotation marks and separated by a coma. That’s the format that should be replicated in the exported Excel file.
8. **It’s time to customize the list. Add “  to the cell B2, and “, to C2, and write the formula =B2&A2&C2 in D2.
9. Drag all three cells down to auto-populate the list
10. Delete the last comma since this item will be the last one in the filter
    
11. Copy the list in the column D and paste to the Advanced filter replacing two random projects
    
12. All done! Now my widget is filtered by the list of multiple parent folders and projects. Each time a new parent is created though, I would need to add it in quotation marks to the end of my script in the Advanced filter.

*As mentioned in the previous part, it’s safer to have IDs than names in the filter. This guideline is based on Names for the ease of comprehension, but I would recommend using the list of Folder/Project ID instead.

**These Excel guidelines are the most basic ones. You can use other formulas or CMD/Ctrl + column header to auto-populate the column if needed, the main point is that you can use Excel to format the exported list easily. 

That’s all for today from me 😌

I hope that it will be easier for you now to create masterpieces from your analytics reports! 

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below 👇

Herine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Herine Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover