Concept: Summarization and Attribute Viz Fields

All fields used in vizzes serve one of these field roles: either attribute or summarization. Attribute and summarization fields control how Workday analyzes and groups data in a viz.

Field Role	Attribute	Summarization
Alternate Name	Dimension	Measure
Description	Attribute fields typically contain qualitative data, such as names, dates, or geographical data Attribute fields describe a property of an entity. The data answers who, what, when, and where questions and can be any field type on a data source. Use attribute fields to categorize and group your data. Attribute fields affect the level of detail in the view.	Summarization fields typically contain things you can measure, such as numeric and quantitative values. Summarization fields are numeric values that represent aggregated data from multiple data records. Example: Summarization fields can represent total dollar amounts, average salary, or count distinct of workers. Summarization fields enable you to analyze the attributes as categories.
Field Types Supported	Fields of all field types can be an attribute field. When you use a Currency or Numeric field as an attribute field, the values displayed in the viz are individual, finite, discrete values.	Fields with these field types can be a summarization field: Numeric Currency Text Instance Workday automatically creates summarization fields for each supported field type in the discovery board builder panel. To access the summarizations for a field, click the field in the builder panel to see the list of summarizations. Workday displays all the aggregate functions that the field supports, such as AVG, MAX, or COUNT_DISTINCT. The supported aggregate functions depend on the field type and the type of data source.
Examples	Gender Full Name Is Hourly Hire Date Journal	SUM(Sales) COUNT_DISTINCT(Full Name) AVG(Total Base Pay Annualized in GBP) MEDIAN(Total Base Pay Annualized in GBP)

You can place attribute and summarization fields only in some drop zones in a viz depending on the viz type. Some viz types, such as Chart and Pivot Table, must contain at least 1 summarization field. If you don’t use a summarization field in a drop zone, Workday uses the Count summarization in the viz, which is a count of all data records.

You can use some numeric data as either an attribute or summarization field, such as length. However, some numeric data isn't continuous and you should use them only as an attribute, such as USA zip codes.

Supported Aggregate Functions for Summarization Fields

Field Type	Supported Aggregate Functions
Numeric, Currency	All data source types support: AVG MAX MIN SUM Workday-delivered data sources also support: MEDIAN PERCENTILE 5 10 25 50 (the same value as median) 75 90 95 97 98 99
Instance, Text	All data source types support: COUNT_DISTINCT

2024R2 Feature Note: Median and Percentile Summarizations in Discovery Boards