Column filtering

[darybrain]

Hey Gang,

I have recently been upgraded from version 7 to 8.3.  Within v7 I found it very useful to be able to copy and paste data (in my case customer nos) into a Column Filter using the In operator as I could populate considerably more then what was allowed when attempting the same type of Expression Filter (due to text length).

My question is how do I do this within Report Studio?  All the filter options I have looked are expression filters and I therefore am not only limited dramatically by the numbers of entries, but also have to format to the syntax.  Surely this functionality must be available.

I tried creating a prompted page to simulate this, however, I have been informed that these reports cannot be saved to CSV.  This again is essential, due to the volume of data I regularly pull.

Any help would be appreciated.

[blom0344]

Welcome to the world of Webbased BI   ;D
Whereas version 7 was client-server based, version 8 has no client and therefore no additional client-based functions.
Version 8 is based around limiting the data fetched and processed by using prompts where the values selected are distributed to the main query (by the use of a Cognos parameter) 

[darybrain]

blom0344,

Thanks for the response.  I understand about the architectural changes, however, any idea how I get around this?

A common type of query that many users did here is to copy and paste a list into a column filter.  These lists change depending on the marketing requirements and can be upto 3000 rows.  Even if the In statement within the Query Expression could handle that many, understandably typing that many in is not practical.  As previously mentioned, due to the volume of data it is also common to generate these lists in CSV format which I believe prompted cannot do.

As with most coporate setups there are many restrictions on what specific users can, so I don't know if some for of temporary table is available or wether or not we could read from a file.

[blom0344]

The preferred solution is to add consolidation levels to the low-grain dimension. Obviously this means you cannot select at will any set for the filter, but in any case this is impractical anyway.
In my years in the retail business we often had up to 10 consolidation levels available to users to use as filters.
An additional benefit is that this precludes reporting over slightly different sets which often causes discussions over the true and right outcome of measures.

Technically one could also upload - on the fly -  sets of data to tables and join these to the fact. Dragging a dataitem from such a table will trigger the INNER join and have the effect of a filter.