Filter options available on prompt...

[Chris_]

I'm currently working on a report to track progress of our online learning modules.  The people who run the reports that I've created won't have access to Report Studio but will have access to the reports that I've created.

To keep it simple, online learning modules we have are for lets say Finance and Engineering, so on the learning module of our system we have courses like this...

Eng - Course 1
Eng - Course 2
Eng - Course 3
Fin - Course 1
Fin - Course 2
Fin - Course 3

My report when run, will allow the user to select the course from a prompt and view details on it's participants and their progress status.  The snag is that I want to create two reports as I don't want the user seeing both Engineering and Finance reports.  I'd like to create one report for each, and within that report filter it for the modules that apply - however I'd still like to give them the prompt to select a course.

Is this possible?  Tried giving it a shot and got a little confused with the filtering.  I wasn't sure if its possible to filter down modules before the prompt kicks in?

Thanks in advance, Chris.

[Chris_]

Any thoughts on this?

[CognosPaul]

Do you want the users to select the different modules in the report, or do you different report views for each module?

If you want to allow the users to switch between modules you can create a radio prompt for the modules cascading onto a value prompt for the courses.

The value prompt will only generate the list after the radio prompt has a value. If the radio prompt is set to auto submit then the values would update on the fly.

[Lynn]

Hi Chris,
Multiple flavors of the same report can lead to maintenance headaches, so trying to create a single report that has the necessary flexibility built in is a good thing.

A cascading prompt makes sense, as Paul mentions, if you are just trying to make it convenient for the users by not having to wade through a longer list of courses than necessary. If there is a more stringent security reason, then how do you identify which users can see what? Figure that out and then apply security so that only the courses a user is permitted to see are returned. Ideally this is in the Framework model if it applies broadly, but it could be done in a report.

Reports views are also an option, but I think when you set the prompt values in the properties for the view you must supply all required prompt values so keep that in mind if you have multiple prompts. E.g., if you have a course type prompt (Eng, Fin, etc.) and also a course prompt (Course1, Course2, etc.) I don't think you can set the view to supply only the course type if both prompts are required.