Cascading List of Values

List of Values is a powerful feature that allows users to select from a pick list when setting conditions in a query. This is especially important if you want to query on codes linked to a set of products. Using the List of Values feature, you will not need to memorize which codes go to which products.

The part that I would like to focus on is Cascading List of Values. In a real world Data warehouse for example, we may have thousands of customer codes. As a business user, in order to get to the customer codes I desire, I would probably want to select my customers from a certain region. Using Cascading List of Values, I can first select which regions I want to view and then select my customers from there.

Please note that it is important to think of the most efficient path a business user can take to get to their answer. One blunder that happens with many developers is the lack of planning when creating a Cascading List of Values. Some may include too many levels which in the long run increases the response time of user selection or too few levels which would cause users to spend too much time looking for certain values.

Here is an example on creating a cascading list of values. Let’s use a universe that contains markets inside regions and create a cascading list on markets. At the end of the day we will want to select our markets that belong to a set of regions that we drilldown from. Note that I have used markets instead of customers because it’s easier to display on the webi pic.

First we will need to go into the “edit properties” tab of the market object object. From there click on the edit button.

A query panel will come up with the market object on the Result Objects window. On the conditions window, drag and drop the “Region” object and choose the “in list” option so that we can choose from a list of Regions.

After running the query, it is important to have the Hierarchical View checked in the edit properties tab. The reason is that this view is much more user intuitive than the tabular view when selecting from the prompts. You can test this out to see for yourself.

Once you have become comfortable with creating cascading list of values, you will be able to present business users with user intuitive selections that will increase productivity and reduce response time.