What exactly does a Calculated Filter do? What is it used for? Any tuts out there (other than Wiki)?

Larry Beasley shared this question 6 years ago
Answered

The Wiki is very vague. It seems interesting but I don't know where to start and what usefulness it has. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. I'm not trying to do anything in particular, I'm just looking to find out if there is something that I'm missing out on.

Replies (6)

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I just had a thought, please let me know if I'm correct. Would a calculated filter be the equivalent of a HAVING statement? I feel like that's the idea behind it. If I wanted to lookup patient balances HAVING a SUM > [some amount].

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Hi Larry,

Calculated filters are very useful when a database has a complex set of "where" clause components to define a certain business rule or status.

For example, I once worked on a Yellowfin implementation that reported from a workflow management system database. In that system, the business rule that defined an "Active Task" was quite complex (i.e. there were 20 or so components in the where clause to define this rule). I created a calculated filter in the view called "Active Tasks" that include all of the where clause logic.

This meant that anyone who wanted to write a report on "Active Tasks" only needed to drag the "Active Tasks" calculated filter item into the filter section of the report design page. This not only made the report creation process significantly faster, it also meant reduced errors in the report compared to each report writer having to manually replicate the complex where clause logic in every report.

The prologue to this story is that about 6 months after the system was live and with about 50 reports written, The business owner of the system came to me, very apologetically, to say that the business has redefined the business rule for active tasks and ask me who long it would take to update all of the reports. I told the business owner it would take about 15 minutes. He said: "15 minutes per report, that's not too bad I suppose". I replied with: "No. I mean 15 minutes in total. I only have to make the change in one place and all reports will automatically update." On that day Yellowfin helped make me look like a report writing superstar :-)

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I've been avoiding coming back to this question because I'm a little more confused now. I'm failing to understand what you were able to do. How were you able to insert a where clause in the calculated filter? I'm using a third party license so perhaps the features aren't available to me.

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Closing this item due to the inactivity. However if there are any additional requirements, please let us know.

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Hi Steve,

It is a interesting and inspiring story, great example of understanding the calculated filter!!

Thank you so much for sharing, ^^

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Hey Diwanshu, have moved your query to it's own topic over here.

Will provide further updates via the above.


Thanks,

David

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