Input Controls / Hierarchy

[Former Member]

Hi,

We're looking into upgrade Service Pack 2. One of the nice new functionalities in Web Intelligence are input controls. When playing around with them a bit, we found them very useful to apply different selection filters on several objects, each belonging to a different dimension.

When we wanted to use input controls to sort of "select down into" a hierarchy within 1 dimension (so several object related to each other in a hierarchy), we found a selection on an object at eg. the top level of the hierarchy does not apply to the list of value of the input control for the lower levels (objects).

For example, dimension month.

Hierarchy: Semester > Quarter > Month

3 input controls on 3 objects: Semester, Quarter, Month

Selecting eg. Q1, does not limit the list of values of input control for Month to Jan, Feb, Mar

Instead all list of months need to be scrolled

This is unfortunate. For the above example, this is not that big an issue since the list of values in any case only has 12 entries. For other hierarchies however ...

Are we overlooking something? Can we get to above functionality from Input Controls?

If not in SP2, is this planned for the future? eg. SP3?

Thanks for feedback!

Raf

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Raf,

Thanks for your feedback about input controls.

This feature has been introduced as a first step in SP2, and will be improved in the coming releases (esp. with the XI 4.* codeline), and input controls dependencies is indeed listed with the highest priority on our improvement list (and more generally "context aware" input controls).

In the meantime, you may partly workaround the limitation, if you need to control 2 hierarchy levels, by defining an input control L1 to select first level, filtering a document area where you insert a table T2 listing entries for the second level.

Table T2 can be defined as input control (cf. table contextual menu) to filter another set of report elements.

For instance you can list all European countries with L1, set T2 to list European Cities, so when you select Norway from L1, you'd get T2 filtered to select only from Oslo, Stavanger, Narvik, Trondheim, etc.

(This behavior is currently restricted to an input control to a report element as input control only, i.e. no more than two hierarchy levels)

Hope that helps,

David.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the feedback!

Good to know it is a feature high on the list.

[Former Member]

Hi Raf,

The functionality to filter the data as you select the values from the input controls (much like one would work with cascading prompts) is not available, so you are not missing anything.

Drill Filters are possibly your answer.

Regards

Jacques

[Former Member]

Hi Raf,

I am also surprised that input controls doesn't restrict the values of the hierarchy. I noticed this just after your comment

But in that case you can use the drill filter option to restrict the values of the object in the lower hierarchy.

For this you need to create custom hierarchies in the universe if already not present in the universe.

To disable the drill feature you can create the objects at the report level or you can use detail object if already present in

the universe for this purpose.

Regards,

Rohit