Field's Max and Min values as Default values in Control

Question

I have 2 controls, Start Date and End Date. I would like to have the min and max of a particular field to be selected as default values of the controls. Is there anyway to do it. I tried creating a calculated field, max or min({field},[],pre_filter) but later realized that we can't add calculated field into a parameter. I'm using Standard Edition. Any help/idea is much appreciated.

Answer 1

I encountered a similar question recently and developed a workaround for this by connecting to my Redshift cluster which required 2 things:

1. A table housing all users for the dashboard in question

2. A table that houses the metrics I'm setting defaults on

I created a separate dataset for setting default parameters which contained a complete list of my users, along with the min/max values from querying the second table with the value. Something like:

SELECT USER_NAME
, MIN_METRIC
, MAX_METRIC
FROM USERS A
CROSS JOIN (SELECT MIN(METRIC_VALUE) MIN_METRIC
, MAX(METRIC_VALUE) MAX_METRIC
FROM METRIC_TABLE) B

Once you've built this new data set, you'd add it to your existing analysis and utilize it for setting default parameters, adding the controls, and setting the filters to key off of them.

The downside to this approach is that it does require an exhaustive user list as any null users would see whatever the non-dynamic defaults are, but with an appropriate user table, this shouldn't be an issue.