Business Intelligence Tutorial

Lesson 27. Setting filters

In this lesson, you will set filters that limit the members or data that are loaded into an OLAP application. For example, if the OLAP model contains data for the entire year, you can set a filter to load only the data for the second quarter.

In this exercise, you will create a filter that limits the data loaded in your OLAP application to data from 1996.

1. On the Name Filters page, type Sales96 in the Name field and click Add to List. The name is added to the Metaoutline Filter List field.
   
   
2. Click Next and the Assign Member Filters page is displayed.
3. Select Sales96 in the Metaoutline Filter List field.
4. In the Members field, open the tree view of the Year dimension and select the Time, Year hierarchy.
5. Click Define Filter and the Filters window is displayed. Use this window to specify the data to be filtered from the OLAP application. You will create a filter on the time dimension that has one condition.
6. For the first condition, keep the value of Year in the Column field. In the Operator listbox, select the equals sign (=).
7. Click the button to the right of the Condition field and the Select Values from Time, Year window is displayed.
8. Select 1996 from the list and click OK to return to the Filters window.
9. On the Filters window, click Add, and the filter is displayed in the Filters field. If you want, you can edit the filter directly in the Filters field, but do not do that now.
10. Click Verify to make sure the syntax of the filter is correct, and click OK to close the Filters window. The Assign Member Filters page looks like this:
    
    

Reviewing filters

In this exercise, you will examine how to set filters on dimension members, and review the filters you have created.

• Click Next and the Assign Measure Filters page is displayed. On this page you can define filters for dimensions that contain measures, such as the Accounts dimension. For example, you could open the tree view of the Accounts dimension, select the Sales table, and define a filter that limits sales to those greater than 100.
• Click Next and the Review Filters page is displayed. On this page you can look at all your filters. You can also go back to previous pages to edit existing filters or add more filters.
• Click Next and the Finish window is displayed.

What you just did

In this lesson, you set a filter that limits the data loaded into your OLAP application to data from 1996.