Steve,
We thought this was pretty clearly described on page 34 of the Guide in the section "Incorporating PMF Dimensional Drills into your Reports."
In case you read that and it somehow isn't clear, Dimensions have two types of amper vars:
First, the entire Dimension clicked or selected Dimension path for every Dimension used is in a variable named after the Dimension. So if your Dimension is called Location, the variable is &LOCATION. This variable contains the entire pathed value. So if Location has 3 levels (Country, Region, City) then &LOCATION contains the values clicked or selected or whatever, separated by tilde chars as a delimiter.
For example:
&LOCATION='US~WEST~LA'
You can simply pass this entire string to any gadget or other content managed in PMF. For the Search Gadget, to get the entire string into the search box, you could code:
-SET &SEARCH_STR = &LOCATION ;
Second, if you choose, you can also break the components of the string up. You would issue a -INCLUDE to our snipping routine (GADG_DIM_PARMS_MULT.FEX) to cause that to happen. The snipping routine is auto included, however, for anything displayed on the PMF Dashboard display mechanism - so if you are dealing with a Gadget, the snipping just happens, handled automatically by the Dashboard, just as the Dashboard also passed other information such as current sizing of the Gadget display area, etc. Snipped vars look like this:
[DIMENSIONNAME]_LEVEL[NN]_VALUE
For Location with three levels, the vars would be:
&LOCATION_LEVEL01_VALUE
&LOCATION_LEVEL02_VALUE
&LOCATION_LEVEL03_VALUE
If you just wanted to pass the level 3 value of City to the Search Gadget, you would code:
-SET &SEARCH_STR = &LOCATION_LEVEL03_VALUE ;
Hope this helps.
Bob Jude Ferrante
Director of Business and Development
WebFOCUS Performance Management
Bob_Ferrante@ibi.com
917-339-5105
I'll take any questions about PMF - business or technical - anytime!