Summary
While viewing reports within Yellowfin or embedded into your own website, generally you will be able to see and tweak the User Prompt filters using the filter pane.
However, what if you wanted to highlight certain filters when presenting your chart or include them in a PDF export which may be reviewed by someone unfamiliar with the report? You may also want to display filters that are ordinarily hidden from users.
Yellowfin makes this possible with the "[Filter]" Text Widget Parameter. This is a text tag you can include on a report canvas that dynamically updates to display the filter's value.
While this article covers the [Filter] tag, there are other Text Widget Parameters you can use to display information such as the report name or aggregation totals. To read more about the options available to you, take a look at our Wiki page on the topic here.
Creating a Text Filter Widget
To create a report like the example above, follow these steps:
First, create a report with at least one filter. For our example, we're using the Ski Team report called Revenue by Media Category. If you're following along, make sure the Demographic field is added as your filter. We've renamed it 'Revenue Demographic' to be more specific.
Next, click on the Charts tab at the top and create your primary chart. To make text widgets available for use, you need to enable the Report Canvas mode. To do this, you simply need to create at least two charts.
For our example, we only want to display the first chart, so we've left it as a basic Text Chart.
Now click on the Design tab. Add your chart(s) to the canvas. As we're now using the design feature in Canvas mode, you'll have access to Text Widgets. Here, we want to add some paragraph text to our canvas, which we will use to display our filters. Feel free to use one of the other options if that fits your design better. Drag the widget to your canvas to use.
Click on your text box and then add in the tag [filter:1]. 1 stands for the first defined filter from your Data step. So if you want to use a different filter, use the corresponding value. Hit Preview Canvas if you want to see what this looks like.
However, if you also want to display something if no filter values are defined, you'll need to combine the EMPTY parameter with your filter tag. It looks something like this. Note the colon character used to separate tags.
Here's an example of what this looks like in practice. On the left you'll see the chart with no filter options selected, so the text widget displays "All demographics". On the right, we've selected the filters Culture and Luxury:
Finally, we've included a quick example of how a report might look with multiple filters and some of the other text widget parameters available to you:
Caveats
As mentioned in the steps above, you need to enable the Canvas design mode for your report with the addition of a second chart in order to gain access to the Text Widget Parameter feature.
You can currently only use Text Widget Parameters in the Report Builder; they don't work on Canvas Dashboards.
If you are have any further questions on this article, contact Support with a new ticket or send us an email.