[From Wrike] Behind The Scenes of Custom Fields in Wrike Analyze

Hi Community,

I’m Herine, Wrike Analyze Subject Matter Expert from Support 👋  I hope my previous post on calculated custom fields came in handy!

Now I’ll show some of the backstage magic and shed a bit of light on the skeleton of Wrike Analyze 🙂 I believe you will benefit from reading this piece if:

• You want to report on multiple custom fields or show how they are correlated.
• You’re looking for some technical background in custom fields analytics.

How custom fields are structured in a data model

Data displayed in Wrike Analyze is stored in analytics databases. They’re grouped in data tables that are linked with each other forming quite a complex data model. This is what a data table looks like in the Wrike interface:

“Task Custom Field” is the name of the table, and the dimensions below are its columns. Here’s what the table looks like in the data model (this view is not available in the Wrike interface):

Data in the rows are unique to each account, but the structure of the table is the same.

Why is the structure important? It explains why it’s not possible to filter a widget by more than one custom field.

For example, let’s say a widget is filtered by a multiselect custom field type. The whole Task Custom Field data table will be filtered to it:

Now it’s not possible to display anything that falls outside of that green selection. Once the widget is filtered to multiselect custom fields, it will display only them. If, let’s say, “Task Custom Field Date Value” is added to the same widget, the widget will show no results since the relevant date fields live in other rows.

Limitations: only one filter per widget

Therefore, it’s not possible to add custom fields as separate columns to a pivot table: the widget needs to be filtered by a field name, and since there’s just one custom field data table, there can be only one custom field name filter:

Of course, several names can be added to the same filter, but that will just add more rows to the same custom field column and will not break it into two:

What can be done to put custom fields in different columns? In my future posts, I’ll share two types of workarounds, depending on the analytics database type of your account.

And as a bonus, here’s a checklist of a few important things that should be kept in mind when working with custom fields in Wrike Analyze:

• Custom fields should be shared with everyone (fields shared with specific users are not exported to Wrike Analyze).
• There is a separate custom field data table for each level: one for tasks, and one for folders/projects. It’s important to use dimensions from the correct level.
• *There can be just one custom field filter in a widget/board.
• *Only existing values live in custom field tables: it’s not possible to report on blank values.

*These limitations can be avoided, see how in the next posts.

I hope you enjoyed diving into some tech stuff with me!

Herine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike

Herine Wrike Team member Infórmate sobre las funciones y prácticas recomendadas de Wrike