The member color locking feature allows users to "hard-code" color allocations to specific hierarchy members in a given report.
Pyramid is designed to use predefined color palettes from "themes" - which are color selections made to fit corporate brands or requirements. The color allocations for visuals are done based on an ordered listing and change automatically based on the number of elements in the visual at any given time. It is triggered when users assign hierarchical selections to the Color Drop Zone when they are building their visual.
Note: this feature is not available in the Community Edition.
No Locking
A report may start out as the first pie chart below, with the colors allocated out to each of the countries in the query. Any subsequent changes made to that report (slicing, dicing etc) may see subsequent renderings of these countries with different colors.
So if a user eliminated "France" from the query, the colors of the countries downstream from France would be allocated the colors in their original order - effectively changing the colors for Germany, Mexico, United Kingdom and the United States (compare the green box in the image above vs the green box below).
This is not always desirable.
The solution is to "lock" the colors down for a given report, so that any subsequent query changes do not make adjustments to the colors for the selected hierarchical member elements.
Locking Colors
To lock colors, users first need to create their graphical visualization as normal. Once they have all the elements set, users can go to the design tab of the ribbon (red arrow below) and click the top of the Member Color Lock button. This will "snapshot" the current colors in the report.
So in our example, if the color lock was set, the elimination of France would not adjust the downstream colors of Germany, Mexico, United Kingdom and the United States (shown below).
Unlocking or Adjusting Colors
To unlock the colors, users can remove the color lock by either clicking the same ribbon button, or using the sub-menu options. To adjust colors, users can unlock the listing, make adjustments to the colors of the report items (through the formatting menus) and then re-lock the report again.
Alternatively, users can also see and edit the current color lock by choosing to view the member-color allocations using the sub-menu option View Locked Members and adjust the color for any element by clicking on its legend and choosing a new color through the color picker.
