# Interactivity

> Make dashboards explorable with cross-filtering, dashboard filters and controls, and click-to-drill.

*[View this page in the Flax docs](https://flax-analytics.com/docs/visualizations/interactivity)*

Flax dashboards are interactive: viewers filter the whole board, click a chart to
narrow the rest, and drill into a mark to see the detail behind it. This page
covers all three. Interactivity never widens access — governance and row-access
rules are enforced independently in the warehouse, so a filter can only ever show
you rows you were already allowed to see.

## Cross-filtering

Click a mark on any chart — a bar, a slice, a point — and the clicked value becomes
a filter applied to the other tiles, which re-run against it. This is
**cross-filtering**: one chart drives the rest of the board. A "Clear cross-filter"
control removes it. Under the hood, the clicked tile emits a `{field, op, values}`
selection that subscribing tiles add to their query; re-runs are coalesced so one
click can't storm the warehouse.

## Dashboard filters and controls

A dashboard exposes shared filters and controls that apply across its tiles:

| Control | Behavior |
| --- | --- |
| **Defaults** | Seed the viewer's filter bar; viewers can override them. |
| **Locked** | Always applied and not overridable — use for governance-style scoping. |
| **Grain** | Switch the time grain across time-based tiles. |
| **Parameters** | A value control, or a *field-swap* that changes which dimension a chart groups by, chosen from a defined set of options. |

Viewer filter state lives in the URL, so a filtered view is shareable as a link.

## Drill-down

Clicking a mark can also reveal what's behind an aggregate. Click, right-click and
tap all open the **same menu** at your cursor, headed by the value you clicked — no
gesture performs an action by itself. The menu offers what applies on that surface:

| Item | Where |
| --- | --- |
| **Filter dashboard to this** | Dashboards only. Becomes **Remove this filter** when that selection is already applied. |
| **Drill to detail** | Everywhere. |
| **View in sheet** | Everywhere — the chart's query narrowed to the clicked value. |
| **Ask AI about this** | Where the assistant is available; the question is grounded on the narrowed query. |
| **Copy value** | Everywhere. |

Filtering is the first item, so it takes focus as the menu opens: click then Enter
applies it. If you cross-filter constantly, **⌘-click** (Ctrl-click on
Windows/Linux) applies the filter directly and skips the menu.

### Without a mouse

A chart is a focus stop, and its marks are traversable:

| Key | Does |
| --- | --- |
| **Tab** | Move focus to the chart. |
| **← →** | Step between marks (**↑ ↓** on a horizontal bar chart, where the categories run down the side). |
| **↑ ↓** | Switch series, when the chart has more than one (**← →** on a horizontal bar chart). |
| **Home / End** | Jump to the first or last mark. |
| **Enter** or **Space** | Open the menu for the focused mark. |
| **Esc** | Clear the focused mark — or close the menu, if one is open. |

The focused mark is highlighted and shows its tooltip, exactly as hovering does. Closing
a mark's menu returns focus to the chart on the same mark, so you can act on several
marks in a row without starting over.

Drill-down itself offers two behaviors:

- **View detail rows** — a modal shows the applied-filter chips and the underlying
  warehouse rows (capped, with CSV export).
- **Drill into a child** — when the clicked dimension declares a child (country →
  city, month → day), rewrite the query in place with a breadcrumb and a way back.

Each dashboard tile drills independently — drill state is tile-local and ephemeral,
never saved to the chart. For the full model, see
[Drill-down](/docs/exploring/drill-down).

## Related

- [Drill-down](/docs/exploring/drill-down) — the complete interaction model.
- [Dashboards](/docs/visualizations/dashboards) — layout, tabs, and filters.
- [Actions](/docs/automation-ai/actions) — turn a control change into an automation.