I am an amateur when it comes to using WebFocus. I need help in creating more effective prompt for user input. The four inputs I have are Date range (From_date and To_date), product category, product type, product ID. I want to make sure that inputs are correct i.e. giving only valid choice using drop down menu, and also giving the user a choice not to make any selection. I have used OR statement and it give the user a choice from the drop down that says no selection made, so that part is accomplished. Once the selection is made, the output would be the available inventory report. The drop down selection should be in this order.
From_Date, To_Date, Product_Category, Product_Type, Product_ID

Date Range: When a user makes the first input selection the To_date should depend on From_Date such as you cannot select a date that older than from Date and To_Date can’t be today’s date because we need the report for closed days only, latest would be yesterday.

Product Category: Once a date range is selected only show the product_category that is valid for that range. If no products are available then do not show that product_category.

Product_Type: Same thing as Product_category, only show the product_types that are available in the available category.

Product ID: Again same as product_type and product_category, only show product ID that are available.

Example of product Category can be commercial, personal, not_for_profit
Example of product_type can be sedan, truck, suv, bus, van

Example of product ID can be a 8 digit serial numbers etc.

So what I am trying to find is how do I limit the drop down menu to only valid entries. I hope the logic that is used for one situation can be used for all.

I will really appreciate if someone can help me with this issue.

Thanks.

We are now using InfoAssist as well as Web FOCUS Developer Studio 8.105

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Emily McAllister>,

Junaid,

Judging from your other post, I'm going to assume that you are trying to do this with Info Assist. Using IA, you can try creating documents. Within those documents you will be able to chain controls. The draw back of doing it that was is that you will have to bring back all the data in the report first before it can create the drop downs. This tends to be rather inefficient. But it can work. Essentially you are creating active reports.

The other thing you can do is to use Developer Studio and the HTML Composer to create a front end to the report. In the HTML page you can put all the logic that you describe. This is the most efficient way to run the report.

Unfortunately, IBI has not built a good way to chain drop downs in to Info Assist. If you find away though, I'd love to know it.

If you use the Dashboard option in InfoAssist you can add prompts to your report and cascade them which has the same effect as chaining the prompts. You can add tables and charts to the dashboard and designate which prompts apply to which table or chart or all of them. The finished output is in Active format which can be HTML or PDF. Hope that this helps solve your problem.

Sandy,

Just remember that the chaining happens after the data run. So you have to gather ALL of the information first,b create the active report, and then the drop downs are created. This process is very inefficient so be aware that you can run into long load times when doing it this way.