Interaction in Omniscope Reports: Selection and Brushing Settings

Omniscope offers multiple ways for users to interact with visuals on the report page, enabling them to drill down and explore data in detail. 

Users can filter, select, and interact with individual chart components — such as bars, lines, markers, or entire chart panes/tiles — either by hand-selecting specific elements / areas or choosing the whole pane or tile area.

The interaction can then include move / keep commands and continue with the granular data inspection inside the interactive table.

The report creator can customise multiple aspects of this user experience when an object on the page is selected, also create different experience for different users of the same report.

Key Aspects to Configure the User Experience

Selection Mode on the chart level

Controls whether viewers can select a single object or multiple objects simultaneously.

For example, they can select multiple bars, markers, pie slices, or panes in charts that support panning or tiling.

The report creator can also define what happens in the target chart when a selection is made:

Selection — Typically shown as 'running ants' around the selected object or area.

Move — The selected data subset temporarily disappears from the page.

Keep — Only the selected subset temporarily remains on the page.

None — No additional action occurs.

  Chart-level settings in Selection section and in Pane section (allowing whole pane selection):

Visual Response (on selection in another view)

The same menu allows you to define how other visuals on the page respond to a selection.

For example, selected data points can be highlighted in connected charts (linked to the same data source), while unselected data appears ‘brushed out’.

The available modes are:

Shadow (default) — Applies a brushing effect where unselected data is greyed out.

Filter — Displays only the selected data points, hiding the rest.

No effect — No visual change occurs.

Since this behaviour can be defined at the per-chart level, different charts on the same page can respond in different ways, giving the report creator precise control over interactions.

The Drill-down Experience

Selection activity diagnostics and controls are visible on the toolbar at the top of the page. The Barometer indicates how many records are filtered in (here 61,295 out of the 275,107 records); further to that, the current selection shows 23,732 records. 

The Keep and Move buttons allow the user to either keep just the selected data subset for further investigation or remove the selection from view. The records that are currently selected can be deselected so the user can make a new selection; alternatively, all active drill-down activities (including any active filters) can be reset, and the data shown on the page will return to the full dataset.

At any point, clicking the Details button will display the granular data in tabular form, which the user can investigate using the circled tools in the image below (search for fields or values, view per field value distributions, or sort column values by clicking on the header).

The values can be copied to the clipboard or downloaded as a CSV file.

Selection Behaviour Settings - understanding the hierarchy

The selection behaviour is controlled in three different areas, where individual report settings can override others:

1. Chart settings (specific to individual charts) — Overrides all other settings.

2. Report settings (applies to the entire report) — The default is to pick up the Profile setting, so there is no need to make changes in every report. If the report creator wants to override profile settings they can pick here single or multiple object selection.

3. User profile settings (configured from project list page profile icon > Profile settings). Allows users to customise their own selection experience.

Report settings: found under the Report's 3-dot menu:

Profile settings: accessible from the Projects' page, Profile icon