Selection Criteria

Selection criteria are used to narrow the contents of a report to only entries that fit the specified criteria. For example, you might want to direct the system to report only vendors with addresses located in the state of Washington, rather than all entries in the database.

There are two ways to enter selection criteria for the main report: in Report Properties and at run time. The two areas exist because they each have distinct purposes. The Report Properties Selection Criteria tab is used to add intrinsic selection criteria. Intrinsic criteria, as opposed to preferential criteria, means the report is not correct unless these criteria are in effect.

For example, a budget to actual report is not correct unless it only selects revenue and expenditure accounts and otherwise excludes asset, liability and fund balance accounts. When something must be entered in order for the report to function correctly, we call that a property of the report and enter the values here. Otherwise, we call it a preference and we enter those selections elsewhere. One should note that the mechanism for adding the criteria is the same.

Alternatively, you may want to prompt the user for a person's ID number when they run the report, but that is by no means crucial for the report to run correctly. It will run for one ID or a thousand. Therefore, a prompt for ID is a preference.

Selection criteria is perhaps the single most important factor in using CDD effectively. Advanced use of selection criteria will empower the user with the advantages of drill downs, sub reports, data lookups, selection pop-up dialogs and more. Selection criteria, defined quite simply, create the focus of your report by assigning a data attribute a comparison value.

When we say that the object type is equal to "RV" for Revenue, what we actually do is identify the Data Attribute we intend to assign (object type), then assign a comparison which identifies how the value will be interpreted (is equal to). This comparison can be one of a number of different possibilities, each with its own effect (e.g., greater than or equal to, less than or equal to, like, not like, etc.). Finally, we assign the data attribute a value ("RV").

Values are expressed in the form of one of the following four response type(s):

• Literal Value — Assigns the data attribute the value of an alpha-numeric string, that is, literally, the value of the letter "R" and the letter "V" together. Literal Values can be expressed as a single value or as multiple values separated by commas (CDD will then parse the values into appropriate syntax for you).
• Prompt Value — These values are also expressed literally, but the main difference is that Prompt Values come to the user at report run-time and consequently can be changed or revised at will. Thus, the initial value of the Prompt for Object Type may be "RV" but nothing prevents the user from changing the value to "XP" (expenditure) or "RV,XP" (Revenue or Expenditure) if they so desire. Another nice feature of Report Prompts is that they support Pop-up Pick Lists. A Pick List is simply a list of useful data that appears at report run-time with the prompt. To diverge for a moment, let us say that we desired a prompt for Person ID in our report. We could define a Pick List to display to us all the Active IDs who were also 1099 Recipients. We could then pick from the available list and the series of IDs would be written into our selection prompt automatically.
• Data Item Value — When you use the Data Item value, you intend to assign the value of Object Type the value of some other Data Attribute from the report. This is most useful when doing Date prompting and you elect to use the internal System Fields Report Date and/or Start Date. In this case, you might state that the Posting Date is greater than or equal to the Start Date and the Posting Date is less than or equal to the Report Date. The reasons for doing this are quite clear, Report Date and Start Date offer all sorts of useful data values, such as Fiscal Year/Quarter/Month Begin or End.
• Drill Field Value — The use of the Drill Field Response Type assigns the Data Attribute the value of another Data Attribute, however the Attribute in question happens to be from another report. This so-called "other report" can be a Drill Report, Data Lookup, sub report, Pick List or other such thing, it just happens to come from somewhere else other than the Main Report Category. Drill Fields are used all over in CDD to link to related report mechanisms together.

Adding New Selection Criteria

Method 1 – Preferential Criteria

• Select File > Open & Run Report from the main menu.
• Select and expand a report to display selection criteria options.
• Select New, then press the OK (To Screen) button.
• In the Selection Criteria window, click Add to open the Report Item window.
• Enter the value upon which you want your selection criteria to be based.
• Click Finish to run the report.

Method 2 – Intrinsic Criteria

• Select File > Open from the main menu.
• Select a report and click OK.
• Select View > Report Properties.
• Navigate to the Selection Criteria tab.
• Click Add.
• Create the new selection criteria using the Report Item window.
• Click Finish to return to the main Report Properties window.
• Select OK.

Editing or Deleting Existing Selection Criteria

When the Selection Criteria screen first opens, the Edit and Delete button are grayed out. To edit or delete a definition, you must load the definition first using the Load button, then edit or delete the definition.

While the user can edit the selection criteria directly in the Selection Criteria window, when they click Save, they run the risk of overwriting the whole definition. Therefore, always use the Load button to first load selection criteria before editing or deleting them. Once the selection is loaded, the user can use the Edit or Delete buttons.

Dynamic Selection Criteria

The dynamic selection criteria feature works only when running the report from BusinessPlus within a Web browser. Both standard reports and inquiries allow the user to add additional criteria at run-time. To address that need in CDD reports, the concept of dynamic selection criteria was added.

he same report and run-time selection criteria still exist for CDD, but now those criteria can be added dynamically by the user at run-time.

Adding Dynamic Prompts

Since report designs can typically revolve around a specific purpose, not all the fields in an information category are automatically available. Instead, the report developer decides which fields will be available for dynamic selection criteria.

The Dynamic Criteria tab on the Report Properties dialog box allows items from the information category to be added to the criteria list by double-clicking the items or using the arrows. Item properties can then be edited by double-clicking on the items in the list on the right side.

The value entered in the Item Prompt field will be the one the user sees when selecting this as a prompt. The Initial Value will be the value for the prompt that is entered by default.

Once the prompts are added to the report the user can save the report design to keep the changes.

Using Dynamic Prompts

When a report is selected in BusinessPlus, the system checks to see if there are any dynamic prompts on that report. If there are, then in addition to the submit button, the user will also be shown an "Add Prompt" button.

Upon selection of this button a new prompt line is added to the tree. The left-side is the list of available prompt items and the right-side is the prompt value. Notice that there is no selection criteria operator. To determine the operator, the prompt uses the following rules:

Dynamic prompts are added to the report's final selection criteria by using an "AND" so that the returned data is the smallest subset of the values chosen.