Businesses rely heavily on reports to make informed decisions in the current data-centric era. Reports provide insight into various aspects of a business, such as sales, marketing, and finance. However, with the immense amount of data available, it can be challenging to extract the necessary information to answer narrow questions. This is where filtering options come in. Bold Reports offers many filtering options to refine the presentation of data within a report, enabling the inclusion or exclusion of specific values from the display and offering many views of data.
In this blog, we will explore the following filters available in Bold Reports and how they can be used:
- Parameter-based filtering
- Dataset filters
- Table-based filtering
- Chart data filters
Parameter-based filtering
In Bold Reports, filtering based on parameters allows you to filter report data through user input. This enables interactive user input during runtime, dynamically influencing the presentation of the report. will act as an interface to get the runtime value from the user on viewer.
The following example displays a product sales report that is filtered using the product ID as the parameter.
Sales Report
To achieve parameter-based filtering, the user needs to create a parameter in the report. They can apply this parameter value to a dataset, table, or chart filter to filter the data during report processing. You can learn more about how to add a parameter to a report in this documentation.
Furthermore, users can implement cascading parameters within reports. Cascading parameters allow one parameter to limit the values available for the next parameter, narrowing choices and creating a more manageable selection process.
Dataset filters
You can also use dataset query parameter filters and a dataset filter. The query parameter filter is used to limit the data retrieval from a database and filter the data in the reports.
Query parameter
To make use of dataset filters, your data source should have the ability to retrieve data based on input through parameters. If this is the case, we will link the report parameters with the query parameter and retrieve only the data needed for the report.
The following screenshot displays how a SQL query gets product details using the invoice number. Using Invoice ID as a parameter, the users can get and apply a value to the query string, and the query fetches data from the database related to that specific parameter.
InvoiceID Parameter
You can learn more about query filtering in this documentation.
You can also add a filter to the query. The query filter has the same functionality as the query parameter. The query filter can be added like in the following screenshot.
Query Filtering
Filtering datasets
We can make use of when connectors don’t have the ability to filter the data through parameters in the query.
In this case, you will retrieve all the data from the database and then filter it in report preparation. The following screenshot shows how to add filters in a dataset.
Adding Dataset Filters
You can learn more about how to add a parameter to a report in this documentation.
Table-based filtering
Bold Reports employs table-based filtering, allowing users to filter data within the tablix data region. Imagine you’re working with a report that contains multiple tables. While each table needs to display different data, they all draw from the same dataset. In such cases, you can filter the data from dataset to show only the information relevant to each specific table.
The following image is a case of showing of Q1 and Q2 sales displayed in two tables, but the data is retrieved from one dataset.
Sales By Quarter
To achieve this, apply the filter to the table, as you can see in the following image.
Table Filter
To learn more about table-based filtering, refer to this documentation.
Chart data filters
Like with tables, if you want to show specific data in a chart or limit the data in a chart, then you can add a filter to it. To do this, apply the filter over the chart columns, as shown in the following image.
Chart Data Filters
To learn more about chart-based filters, you can refer to this documentation.
Conclusion
I hope this blog provided a clear overview of the data filtering options in the Report Designer that help deliver a seamless user experience. To explore further, go through our sample reports and Bold Reports documentation.
If you have any questions, please post them in the comments section. You can also contact us by submitting your question through our contact page, or if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
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