A Parent-child table builds a tree from records that point to their parent: an employee and their manager, an account and its parent account, a department and the department above it. The depth comes from the data, so it does not need to be known in advance, and different branches can have different depths.

Tree table or parent-child table

If your hierarchy is stored as separate level columns (category, subcategory, product), use the Tree table instead.

Build a parent-child table

1. In Components → Charts → Tables, click Parent-child table, then click the canvas.
2. On Data, choose the Analysis model and fill the fields. Parent, Child and Caption take one dimension each; the table stays empty until all three are filled.

Field	Put here	Example
Parent	The parent's ID	manager_id
Child	The record's own ID	emp_id
Caption	The text shown in the tree column	emp_name
Fields	Measures and other attributes shown as columns	title, sales_amount

3. Optional: set Style → Content → Expand levels to choose how much of the tree is open when the report loads.

Readers open and close branches with the arrow in front of each name.

Example: a sales organisation

The org-sales model holds one row per employee per month for 2025: emp_id, manager_id (empty for the CEO), emp_name, title, department, city, month, and the measures sales_amount, target_amount and orders. There are 80 employees in five levels, from the CEO down to sales representatives.

Bind Parent to manager_id, Child to emp_id, Caption to emp_name, and put title, city, sales_amount, target_amount and orders in Fields:

The CEO, Emily Clark, has no manager and becomes the only top-level row. With Expand levels set to 2 and two more branches opened by hand, the table looks like this:

Use month as a filter, not in Fields. See Fields with several values per record.

How values are shown

• A parent row shows its own record. The table does not add up the values of the rows below it. Gary Johnson, a regional director, shows 91,226.95: his own sales, not those of the 24 people in his branch. The CEO shows 0.00 because her own rows hold 0.
• Grand total (Style → Grand total, off by default) is the total of all data under the current filters, calculated by the server. In the example it is 61,165,015.87, although the top-level row shows 0.00.
• Measures are aggregated per record over the current filters: without a filter, each employee's row is the sum of their 12 months.
• Rows under the same parent are listed in order of their Child ID (E1016, E1026, E1029 … under the CEO). There is no sort option, and clicking a column header does not sort.
• The same name can appear in several rows. Records are told apart by their Child ID, so the two employees called John Smith are two separate rows.

Which rows become top-level rows

The Parent value of each row is compared, as text, with the Child values of the other rows. A row becomes a top-level row when its parent is empty, equals its own ID, or is not found among the rows the query returned.

• Filters can therefore move rows to the top. Filter department to East Region: the CEO's row is filtered out, so Gary Johnson becomes the top-level row of the East Region tree.
• A record with two parent rows appears under each parent, each time with the values of its own row.
• A cycle (A is the parent of B and B is the parent of A) does not empty the table: one record of the cycle becomes a top-level row and the others are shown below it. Which one depends on the order in which the query returns the rows.
• If no row ends up with a row below it, the table shows No row has a parent: check that the parent ID and child ID fields use the same set of IDs. For an ordinary level hierarchy use the Tree Table instead. Check that Parent and Child hold the same kind of ID, for example both employee numbers, not a number and a name.

Fields with several values per record

Each field in Fields must have one value per record, as title and city do. A field with several values per record, such as month, splits the record into several query rows, and the tree keeps only the first of them. With month in Fields, every employee shows January only, while Grand total still shows the whole year. To look at one month, add month under Filters or use a filter component on the page.

Expand levels

Style → Content → Expand levels counts the levels below the top-level rows that are open when the report loads:

Expand levels	Visible in the org-sales example
0	The top-level row only, closed (1 row)
1 (default)	The CEO and her six direct reports (7 rows)
2	Three levels (19 rows)
3	Four levels (35 rows)
4 or more	The whole tree (80 rows)
Empty	The whole tree. Clearing the box takes effect the next time the table loads.

Indent, in the same group, sets the indent per level in pixels (5–50, default 25).

Clicking a row

Clicking a name or a measure cell filters the components set in Actions → Interactions → Linked components to that one record. Clicking Gary Johnson's sales filters a monthly sales table to his own monthly sales, not to his branch. Click the cell again to clear the filter. Clicking a dimension column from Fields, such as title, does not filter. See Cross-Filtering.

Style and field options

• The Style tab has the Table groups Table style (see Table Styles), Grid (including Row height and Fit columns to width), Header and Grand total. Content has Text wrap, Font, Align, Hover row, Expand levels and Indent. Column size, row numbers and frozen columns are not available.
• Field menus (⋮ on a field) offer less than on a Table:

Field	Menu items
Parent, Child	Show items with no data
Caption, dimensions in Fields	Rename display name, Row limit
Measures in Fields	Rename display name, Row limit, Format

Sorting, aggregation, Empty values as, conditional formatting (font and background colour, data bars, icons) and drill-through are not available.

Data, export and limits

• The table loads all its rows at once, without paging, and builds the tree in the browser. For a large hierarchy, add filters so that only the part you need is loaded.
• Data preview (component ⋮) lists the query rows flat: one row per record, with the Parent, Child and Caption fields as the first columns.
• Export as Excel and Export as csv (component ⋮ → Export) also write the flat query rows, not the indented tree. See Export.

Related: Tree table · Table · Cross-Filtering