Overlay Security and Preview

Configure your overlay to set security access, view details, and preview in your project.

Overview

You can set security restrictions around what information is available in your overlay and preview new and existing overlays to check if data was loaded and mapped correctly.

Security settings

Full access to the metrics, dimensions, concepts, and calculated properties that rely on the overlay is restricted to users with detailed access. This includes access to details of each record included in the overlay.

To grant users access to Detailed View, Preview, and Metric Lineage, you can configure overlays to have detailed access. For more information, see Data Access Sets.

Users must first have detailed access to the overlay key property to grant detailed access to the rest of the non-key overlay properties. Without detailed access to the key, users will not be able to see detailed information on the overlay regardless of the configuration of the other properties. To grant detailed access after creating an overlay in a project:

1. In a project, on the navigation bar, click Security > Permissions.
2. Select the permission related to your newly created overlay.
3. In Data Security, expand Overlay.
4. Find the overlay and click the value under the Data Access column.
5. Expand Properties to reveal the property's access levels. The access levels are detailed, aggregate, and none. The default is none.
6. Set the access level for the Overlay Key property to Detailed.
7. Set the access level to Detailed for any other properties that should be accessible to users.
8. Click Save.

Now, users who are assigned the selected permission can view the detailed information of individual records in the overlay.

For existing overlays, the data access property is set as None by default. To grant detailed access to the user you must manually select Detailed for the Overlay Key and other relevant properties shown. Users that are not granted detailed access will continue to have their preconfigured aggregate access or the default None access.

Preview your overlay

You can look at the contents of your overlay to check whether data was loaded and mapped correctly with the preview. The preview shows the first 200 records and properties without detailed access are shown as blank. In the preview you can edit the time period for granularity or filter the results by attribute. To preview your overlay in your project:

1. In a project, on the navigation bar, click Model > Analytic Objects.
2. Select your overlay.
3. In the overlay, click Preview.

View details of your overlay

The Detailed View visualization offers a detailed view of your overlay, including the specific records or occurrences in a population. In your project, you can configure the overlay properties to display in Detailed View. For more information, see Configure View Details.

Access your overlay metric's lineage

To see the detailed records of a metric value in your overlay, you can access the Metric Lineage from the info panel of a visualization.

Depending on the visualization filters, context, and the selected data point, Metric Lineage shows the applicable detailed information to give insight into which records were used in the calculation of the metric value. For more information, see Validate Metric Values Using Metric Lineage.

Overlay keys

The key property mapping in your overlay is used as the key value for individual overlay records. Overlays don't have traditional caption support like the other analytic objects in Visier, but a similar effect can be achieved by mapping a more descriptive key value to act as a caption. To better reflect the data from the column in your property’s name, try concatenating the values of other columns using a formula to change the key. To change the key of your property:

1. In your overlay, click Mappings.
2. Click Key > Map from formula.
3. Enter a formula as a descriptive key that concatenates different columns to better describe your data.

Use the Visier Extraction Language to write the formula. For example, the following formula produces a key value of the date or period with the department value ("2015-Sales").

concat({column("Period"), column("Department")},"-")

This is useful for debugging overlay data by better identifying data in the solution. The key value can also be mapped directly from a column in the uploaded source data for the overlay. For more information, see Visier Extraction Language (VEL).