AWS adds hierarchy filtering to Amazon Quick Sight dashboards

AWS has added a hierarchy filter to Amazon Quick Sight that places as many as five related dimensions inside one dashboard control. The feature lets authors replace separate controls for levels such as region, country and city with one parent-child tree.

For readers, the control turns those dimensions into a guided path, from the broadest field to the most detailed. Each selection narrows the choices shown at the next level. Readers can still mix levels—for example, by selecting an entire country alongside one city elsewhere in the hierarchy.

Authors set the path by adding and ordering related fields. The AWS hierarchy-filter documentation says a hierarchy can contain up to five dimension fields, including text, numeric-dimension and Boolean fields, but not measures such as sales or quantity. By default, a hierarchy filter applies only to the selected visual; authors can expand its scope to all sheets and visuals.

When a reader selects a lower-level value, the control automatically selects its parent chain. Ancestor levels appear partially selected, keeping the route to that value visible when selections span different levels.

Search stays within each level rather than running across the entire tree. The top search bar covers only the highest level. A lower level gets its own search box when it contains more than 10 unique values. Above 1,000 unique values, the control shows only a search box instead of listing the values.

AWS distinguishes hierarchy filters from cascading filters, which retain separate controls and use earlier selections to limit the values available in later ones. Hierarchy filters instead nest the entire drill path in one control. Changing the field order later clears selections already saved on the filter.

The dashboard control is separate from AWS’s recent Amazon Quick desktop app rollout, which concerned access to Amazon Quick on Windows and macOS.