Creating Cascading Prompted Filters

A prompted filter can be included in a cascade if it meets the following requirements:

In SAS Web Report Studio, you can set the prompt type to dynamic in the Custom Filter dialog box by selecting the Dynamically generate values option from the Prompt type drop-down list.

A non-prompted filter can be included in a cascade if it begins the cascade; however, it will not appear in the prompts page.

Prompted filters defined in either SAS Web Report Studio or SAS Information Map Studio can be used in a cascade. You have to select them in the Section Filters dialog box to participate in the cascade.

You can order all applied prompted filters, whether they participate in a cascade, using the Manage Prompts dialog box, which is available from the Section Filters dialog box.

The Prompt Order section enables you to specify the order in which the prompts appear on the Prompts page or any other page where values for prompts need to be filled in. To reorder, select the prompt that you want to move, and then click or to move the prompted filter up or down in the order. If prompts are in a cascade, the prompts should appear consecutively in cascade order; however, you can put the prompts in any order.

A cascade relationship is defined between a prompt contained in one prompted filter and another filter.

For example, Filter 1 is called City Filter and contains the prompt called City Prompt, and Filter 2 is called State Filter and contains the prompt called State Prompt. To define a cascade between the filters, you would specify that City Prompt depends on State Filter. Note that the information that would be displayed by the prompt is always a subset of what would displayed by the filter.

You can define dependencies using the Manage Prompts dialog box in the Prompt Dependencies section. The Prompt drop-down list contains the names of the prompts that can participate in a cascade. The Dependency drop-down list contains the names of the filters that can participate in a cascade.

To define a cascade, complete these steps:

The cascade definitions do not have to appear in any particular order; however, when you click OK, a check is performed to ensure that there are no circular dependencies or other illegal cascade definitions.

To remove a cascade, select an entry in the Prompt Dependencies area and then click Remove. If you remove a cascade that was a part of a chain, then the chain is not repaired to skip the missing item. For example, you have three cascade definitions where ZIP code depends on City, City depends on State, and State depends on Region. If you remove City, which depends on State, then the definition is not altered to make ZIP code somehow dependent on Region.

When cascading prompts appear on the Prompts page, each dependent prompt is disabled until you supply the information for the filter that the prompt depends on.

In Example of a Cascading Prompt for Region, CENTRAL has been selected for the Region prompted filter, so the State prompt has been populated with states that are in the central region and the State prompted filter is enabled.

In Example of a Cascading Prompt for State, MN has been selected for the State prompted filter, so the City prompt is populated with the cities in Minnesota and the City prompted filter is enabled.

Next, a user can select cities and then click View Report to see the report based on the results of the cascaded prompt.