Overview of hierarchies

As mentioned in the main Data management section, you can store structural data in CONNECT that usually relates to geographical regions (i.e. provinces, districts) and institutions (i.e. sectors, schools, etc.).

You can also define hierarchies for the structural data, for example Country → Province → District → Village. These hierarchies can be utilized for dashboard charts to enable drilling down to lower levels of disaggregated data.

Under /collect/hierarchies or System → Hierarchies, CONNECT gives you an overview of your hierarchies, if you have already defined some.

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Via click on “edit“ on one of the tiles you will be redirected to a page to edit your existing hierarchies. You can also create a new hierarchy if you click on the plus-sign. This will redirect you to a page with an empty formula (see create new hierarchy).

Creating a new hierarchy

You can create a hierarchy in the Administration section under System → Hierarchies by following these steps:

1. on the overview page click on the plus-sign where you will be redirected to the create page.

2. a page with an empty form will be displayed
   
   

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3. First fill in a Name, Code and a description for the hierarchy. The name and description can be whatever you like but the code needs to be unique as it is the identifier with which this hierarchy will be fetched.

4. next click on “Add projection Parameter“ to add a projection parameter name that will be given to each level in the hierarchy. You can add as much projection parameters as you wish. They will automatically be added to all existing and new levels. Note: this only defines the names of the parameters not their path as those are different for each level.
   
   

5. Then, to create the first level for your hierarchy, click Add level. Note that you start at the lowest level. If you want to build a hierarchy with village → district → province → country, then you need to start with the village level.
   
   

6. A new row is added above the Add level button. Click on the row and the right pane will open with an empty form. There add an identifier for the level and select the data collection ('Referenced Collection') that you want to link to this hierarchy level.

7. Also, you need to set the higher, parent Path for the level. For instance, for level ‘district’ it would be ‘province’ and for level ‘province’ it would be ‘country’. The parent path must be a reference question in your linked data collection that links to the data collection referenced by the next level (above this level). After choosing a parent path a new row will be added automatically on the left panel with a new level referencing the data collection referenced by the selected question in the current level.
   
   

8. There is one more thing to define for the hierarchy level: projection parameters. A projection parameter consists of two things: a path to a certain question in the data collection referenced by this level and a name for the parameter. Remember you already defined the names for the projection parameters before defining your first level.
   
   

9. Once you added all information for this level you can click on the next level and repeat the process.

10. When you have added all the levels for your hierarchy, click Save on the upper left corner. You have now completed creating a new data hierarchy.

The current use case for utilizing a data hierarchy is to enable users to drill down on a topo map chart on a dashboard. More use cases will be added in coming releases. To learn how to apply a hierarchy for a topo chart data aggregation, click here.