Showing filter definition in report

[Penny]

In our old Impromptu reports (yes we moved from Impromptu to Cognos 10, and then Cognos 11), we could easily show the detail filter.  I know that in Cognos Analytics filters are a little different and you can have several.    We are getting a request from our Finance staff that when they are creating adhoc reports for the auditors and have to tweak filters they would like a simple way to show this in the report output.

Any suggestions?  Thanks.

[Lynn]

In our old Impromptu reports (yes we moved from Impromptu to Cognos 10, and then Cognos 11), we could easily show the detail filter.  I know that in Cognos Analytics filters are a little different and you can have several.    We are getting a request from our Finance staff that when they are creating adhoc reports for the auditors and have to tweak filters they would like a simple way to show this in the report output.

Any suggestions?  Thanks.

Click on a layout container and then click the funnel icon. At the bottom of that menu there is an option to insert filter text. Alternatively, there is the good 'ole ParamDisplayValue or ParamValue functions to show prompted values.

[dougp]

That looked interesting.  I thought, "Why am I building my own?"  Then I tried it.

It doesn't always work.  If the user needed any level of complexity or flexibility and chose to use the Detail filter expression dialog (through Query Explorer) to create a filter, some of the filters may be displayed, but a message stating that Expression based filters have been applied is all they get for the ones build in the Detail filter expression dialog.  (Once again demonstrating IBM's grasp of the English language.  It should be Expression-based.)

[Lynn]

That looked interesting.  I thought, "Why am I building my own?"  Then I tried it.

It doesn't always work.  If the user needed any level of complexity or flexibility and chose to use the Detail filter expression dialog (through Query Explorer) to create a filter, some of the filters may be displayed, but a message stating that Expression based filters have been applied is all they get for the ones build in the Detail filter expression dialog.  (Once again demonstrating IBM's grasp of the English language.  It should be Expression-based.)

Agreed it will only show filters based on the GUI dialog and not expressions, but the original question was about end users doing ad-hoc reporting and needing a simple way to include them in the report. Our end users tend to prefer filtering with the GUI instead of using expressions so I thought this might be a useful suggestion to address Penny's question.

As a more advanced author, I personally hate those GUI filter dialogues and prefer expressions but then I'm an IT type. My reports would tend to have a notes page to share details about filtering, calculations, etc. to aid end users who consume the reports but end users would never do this.

[Penny]

Thanks Lynn.  I thought yahoo when I saw your response and then realized that it didn't meet our needs.

In fact we have found that the interactive filtering is very 'buggy' and unreliable and so have our finance users opening a base report and then authoring - just to add/change filters.

These authors are what I would call power users and their filters are often created in the expression editor - for example ACCT_CODE BEGINS WITH  'n' OR ACCT_CODE = 'nnnn'.  These are referring to our chart of accounts.  The output from this feature doesn't really show the detail of the filter like it did in Impromptu (can't believe I am saying that Impromptu was better for this but it was). 

The problem with using ParamDisplayValue or ParamValue functions to show prompted parameter is that this doesn't show the expression used in the filter.  Was it equal to, greater than?

Thanks for responding however.

[rockytopmark]

Penny -

"this doesn't show the expression used in the filter.  Was it equal to, greater than?"

In most cases, the only thing that will ever change is the parameter Values... so you can simply copy the filter text into a report expression, and concatenate the parameter values.  For example, to show a filter on someDate...

To gets something in the report's output like:

'someDate = 2017-11-17'


...for the actual filter:

[namespace].[querySubject].[someDate] = ?p_someDate?


could be coded in a report expression, like:

'someDate = ' + paramValue('p_someDate')
  or
'querySubject.someDate = ' + paramValue('p_someDate')
  or
<whatever is desired>  + paramValue('p_someDate')


This way, the user knows whether it was = or > or <, etc...