Did you miss our February 1st webinar Dynamic Dates in WebI? We have a quick summary of the webinar with the webinar presenters’ key takeaways from their session. This session had a lot of audience interaction with the presenter and we highly recommend checking it out if you use Web Intelligence!

Here is the webinar overview:

A common use case is to run a Web Intelligence report for a date range. That can be easily done with hard-coded date values, but that is not a very user-friendly approach always having to edit the query. Certainly prompts are more user-friendly. However, if you want to schedule a report for a dynamic, named date range such as yesterday, last month, last quarter, etc. you are at a dead-end.

This session will show how I built what I call a “Calendar Universe” a number of years ago that has stood the test of time. We will cover various ways to use dynamic dates talking about the pros and cons of each including the “Calendar Universe”.

Key takeaways from this session:

• Set the prompt order in the Query Properties.
• Use the format suggestion in the date prompt to convert the prompt value (always a string) to a date.
• You cannot compare objects in a filter. Instead create a variable that does the comparison and filter on that.
• Define a custom format for something other than the default or other available formats.
• Copy the @Prompt function syntax details from the query script of a universe query and then paste it into a free-hand SQL query.
• When using “Results from another query” cannot use “Between”; must use “Greater than” and “Less than”.
• Add the pre-defined Query Summary cell to get an objective view of the queries such as execution time and number of rows returned.
• Generate a date table dynamically with a common table expression (CTE) in a free-hand SQL query.
• Add the pre-defined Query Summary cell to get an objective view of the queries such as execution time and number of rows returned.

Don’t forget you can stream this webinar in its entirety as well as ever other Let’s Speak BO webinar we’ve hosted when you are logged in on the site. It is completely free to join!