hi guys, i have a question about a generic dates concept. eg our datasets have some events related to the events dates. so for obvious reasons if we're building a chart out of those, the dates with no events are just being skipped and the graph doesn't go down to 0 but connects the dots for the days when the events were present. so the question is whether good data has some way to handle it internally by adding generic dates dataset or creating some kind of metric that can mind those gaps? or the only solution will be to add the generic dates to the dataset at the database level? thanks much in advance for the tips

Hi Masha, if the data is missing from the insight, you can try forcing it to show as a “0” by using The IFNULL function. The function works by turning records that have NULL values into 0's, but take into account that it can’t force a 0 to show up if no records exist. Also try adding the following format to your metric:

[=Null] 0; #,##0

For your reference, see: Null column | The GoodData Community

Depends on if Masha uses GoodData platform or GoodData cloud. We provide a different and I would say more convenient solution in the cloud product.

thank you both Moises and Jan, i guess i was a bit unclear. i meant the case when our initial dataset only has date values for the dates when the events were present. which i guess means that we cannot force nulls to be revealed if they just don't exist in the dataset, right? i thought maybe good data has some kind of generic dataset that we could combine our data with to solve this issue internally in good data? and yup, we're using the platform solution

If the data does not exist, then it would be necessary to load it into the workspace, otherwise the platform won’t be able to interpret it as “missing”. Unfortunately I am not aware of an alternative.

@Jakub Sterba isn't there any kind of workaround solution for Platform? I can offer only one option - migrate to Gooddata cloud, where we provide standard feature for this use case - show missing values. Described here and here(for metrics)

This article should help with missing values on GD Platform: https://community.gooddata.com/data-models-kb-articles-46/how-to-display-null-or-missing-values-98

got it, thanks!