multiple if's for calculated field in tableau

Question

please pardon the absolutely newbie question but i'm very new to tableau. what I'd like to do is create a message based on which filter flags are active. so, in psuedo code, i'd do something like this:

message = ''
if filter1 == 1:
  message += 'filter 1 is active'
if filter2 == 1:
  message += ' filter 2 is active'
return message

problem is, I'm not even sure how to do multiple if statements - i keep getting a syntax error. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Here is an example of how I accomplished something similar:

IF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_1] = 'xxxxx' THEN 1
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_2] = 'xxxxx' THEN 2
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_3] = 'xxxxx' THEN 3
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_4] = 'xxxxx' THEN 4
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_5] = 'xxxxxx' THEN 5
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_6] = 'xxxxx' THEN 6
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_7] = 'xxxxxx' THEN 7
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_8] = 'xxxxxx' THEN 8
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_9] = 'xxxxx' THEN 9
ELSEIF [ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_10] = 'xxxxxx' THEN 10
ELSEIF ISNULL([ZAVUFA1_FED_COLL_CHOICE_1]) THEN 99
END

As much as I love stackoverflow, Tableau also has a great user forum on their site.

Answer 2

You would create a calculated field called message with this code:

IF filter1 = 1 THEN 'filter 1 is active' END
+ IF filter2 = 1 THEN ' filter 2 is active' END

Answer 3

what I ended up doing is creating a calculated field for each if statement. I then created yet another calculated field that concatenates all of the output from each of the first set of calculated fields I created. Seems like a bit of a hack so If anyone knows of a more elegant way of doing this (making a calculated field of a series of calulated fields seems awfully kludgy) I'd be glad to pass on the points for answering.