Dynamic Column Level Security

I had a project in 2023 in my work where I should secure one column in the data or let’s say a level of data but in a dynamic way. Imaging that as a normal business users you can see Costs and Revenue for the different product categories and their Margin. It is public for pretty much everyone in the organization. However going down into the details of Costs there are some sensitive data like payroll information that shouldn’t be visible for everyone, only for the Manager of the group.

I tried out couple of things but for a while I couldn’t find a solution. Power BI RLS (Row-Level Security) is something I could use to secure the line for the appropriate manager only, but in this case aggregated data would have also been visible only for that manager and not for all. OLS (Object-Level Security) is available in Tabular Editor, but that’s static, a column can be set as visible or non-visible, there is no options to make is dynamic.

Finally I used a Measure Driven approach, and setup up the security with measures that are ultimately used in the report. The measure can identify the level of data in scope and shows or doesn’t show the appropriate value based on the rights.