A shortcut-to-a-filter qualification allows you to move an existing filter into a new filter, and apply the new filter to a report. You can also add additional conditions to the new filter and then apply the new filter to the report. For example, Filter 1 contains two conditions, A and B. You can use Filter 1 as the basis of a new filter, and then add another condition C to the new filter. The data that is filtered for must then satisfy all three conditions A, B, and C to be included in any report which uses the new filter. Note that Filter 1remains unchanged throughout this process.
For example, you are a manager in New England, responsible for stores in Boston, Providence, and Greenwich. Your project contains a filter called Stores In My Region, which is defined as the Boston, Providence, and Greenwich stores. A second filter, called Women's Clothing filter, includes the categories Blouses and Dresses. A third filter, All Days in December 2008, is a date range that includes all the days in the month of December 2008. To study December sales in your stores for women's clothing, you create a new filter. The new filter includes a shortcut to each of the three filters. Use this new filter in your report. The original three filters are unchanged, which is useful for other reports that use one or more of those filters.
You can also use an existing filter as a base for a new filter and then add additional qualifications to expand the overall filter definition. For example, you can take a filter that screens data for all customers in the Southwest region, place that filter into a new filter, and add a new filter qualification for active customers in the current year. The new filter screens data for all currently active customers in the Southwest region.
This approach shows you the value of creating some basic, relatively simple filters in your project, such as a filter for customers in a specific region. Then you can make use of these basic filters within shortcut-to-a-filter filters to make the filter creation process quicker.
On the project's main page, click Create Filter. The New Filter page opens.
In the pane on the left, navigate to the filter you want to use in the new filter.
Right-click the filter and select Add to Filter.
If DHTML is disabled, select the report and click Add > to add the report to the Filter panel.
From the File menu, select Save As. The Save As dialog box opens.
Navigate to the folder where you want to save the filter. Enter a Name and Description for the filter, and click OK. Your new filter is saved.
The filter you created can now be added to a report. For steps, see Adding a stand-alone filter to a report.
When a filter has multiple qualifications, they are always joined by operators. When qualifications are joined, operators govern the interaction between different filtering conditions. Whenever you have more than one qualification in a report filter, you can define the operator as any of the following:
AND
OR
OR NOT
AND NOT
The AND operator is the operator assigned by default when more than one qualification is added to a filter. You can change the default AND operator by simply right-clicking on the word AND in the filter’s definition pane, pointing to Toggle Operator, and selecting a different operator.
For more information on advanced operators to apply to a report limit, see the Logical and Mathematical Operators for Filtering appendix in the MicroStrategy Advanced Reporting Guide.