Interactive dropdowns and charts

[thart21]

Hoping someone can clear up my confusion. I was told by a developer that Report Studio can be used with dropdowns/list boxes/radio buttons to provide interactivity for multiple list items and charts. I need to have 4 dropdowns with selections for the user to be able to change as desired (Customer, Division, Gender & Order Type) and update the related list items and charts. 

I have been trying to add dropdowns on my report page (not a prompt page) and all it is doing is creating a filter/prompt.

Is an Active Report what I need to use to get a Dashboard style interactive report like I've described?

Thanks!

Toni

[charon]

Hi Tony,

there are two possibilities.
1) As you have mentioned, the usage of Active Report.
-> You create an Active Report in Report Studio. The Queries run against the DB like a normal report, but all data will be stored with the layout information of the report into one single file with mhtml format. Also, you can define interactivities for that Active Report as you have mentioned, means selecting one item in an Drop Down Menu will result in several Chart filter actions and more...i suggest you google IBM Examples Active Report or sth like that, there are some nice example report out there

2) You could also create a normal report in Business Insight Advanced or Report Studio and create an own dashboard in Business Insight. There you have also interactivity and a lot of real time modification option.

Note, one big difference between these two is:
in Active Reports, you run the queries once and store the results. Means also, the data is only as up to date as the Active Report mht -file is old. If yoiu want the newest data, you need to run the Active Report again. But, because of that the A.R. is independent to a connection, you can open A.R. in a cave :)
In BI all filter actions are in real time, because he sends the modified requests every time.

Hope this helped...cheerz :P

[thart21]

Thank you so much, makes sense to me now - will probably work with Active Reports first then check out the Bus Insight dashboards. I am building one weekly report for different managers & want to burst it for each mgr/division. If they have some drill down capability, they will be happy. I appreciate your taking the time to explain these to me.

Have a great day,,

Toni

[charon]

you are welcome  ;D

[Galadin]

I create interactive dashboards regularly in Report Studio without the use of Active Reports.  You are correct in that the dropdowns and lists are just filters and prompts, but if you set them to be auto submit, then the result will mimic interactivity.  The other is that you can define Master-Detail relationships between objects, say a map of countries, and the lower objects.  When the user clicks on the Country, the master detail will filter the lower objects based upon that selection.

This interactivity is only available when the object is run as an HTML interactive, say into a dashboard content screen.

If you are bursting and sending out this information, then your only option for interactivity outside of Cognos is Active Reports.  Be aware, these files can become quite large, and they take some extra time to generate since it is pulling and rendering every possible page layout defined.  However, I have a couple of these objects, mainly sent to executives for dashboard and they can't access the network for various reasons.