Circular Dendrogram

The Circular Dendrogram extension for Qlik visualizes hierarchical relationships as a radial tree. Branches fan out from an empty centre to leaves on the perimeter, with edges connecting parent levels to their children. Each top-level branch is rendered in a distinct colour from a categorical palette so the eye can follow group membership at a glance.

When to Use It

• Organisational charts — Show divisions, departments, services, and staff in one view.
• Product or service taxonomies — Map a category tree from top-level groups down to individual SKUs.
• Biological or scientific classification — Render kingdom → phylum → class → order → family hierarchies.
• File systems and folder hierarchies — Visualize directory structures with optional file size as the measure.
• Any nested-category data — Two to ten dimension columns combine into a single readable radial tree.

Key Features

• 2 to 10 dimensions describing the hierarchy levels, plus one measure that drives leaf-node sizing.
• Categorical branch colouring — each top-level branch gets a distinct colour from a Tableau-style palette; descendants inherit.
• Configurable arc extent — render as a full circle (360°), a three-quarter arc (270°), or a semi-circle (180°).
• Adjustable label density — a slider controls how aggressively perimeter labels are pruned to avoid overlap.
• Locale-aware label formatting — values in labels honour the measure's Qlik number format and the app's locale separators, matching what tooltips show.
• Top-N grouping — collapse small branches into a synthetic Others wedge, recursively at each level or at the top level only.
• Selection breadcrumbs — clicking a leaf brightens its ancestor path and dims the rest. Confirming a single-leaf selection re-renders the chart in chain mode — a straight line from root to leaf — so the full path is readable.
• Centre as a node — an optional centre circle with a configurable label, hover tooltip with chart-wide totals, and click to clear any active selection.
• Standard Qlik integration — selections, snapshots, story replay, calculation conditions, master dimension colours, and CSV / Excel data export.

Why Circular Dendrogram?

• Structure first — unlike a treemap (which packs by value) or a sunburst (which shows totals by ring), a dendrogram draws every parent-child relationship as an explicit edge. The shape of the hierarchy is the visual.
• Readable perimeter — labels sit just outside the leaves on the perimeter where the eye can scan them in one pass, with a density slider for crowded data.
• Selection that tells a story — the lasso state shows your pick in the context of the full tree; Confirm collapses to a clean linear chain when you have narrowed to a path. Both states cross-filter the rest of the Qlik sheet.
• Native Qlik experience — calculation conditions, master colours, snapshots, stories, and locale-aware number formatting all work out of the box.

For full configuration details, see the Circular Dendrogram documentation.