About Custom Groups: Grouping Attribute Elements with Banding and Filtering

A custom group lets you group attribute elements from the same or different attributes to meet your reporting requirements. This allows you to group attribute elements on a report in a way that is not defined in your data warehouse. From the perspective of the report design process, a custom group is an object that can be placed on a template and is made up of a collection of elements called custom group elements. Each element contains its own set of filtering or banding qualifications.

For example, your data warehouse contains data based on 12 months of the year, but you want to display data in a report for each season in a year. You can create a custom group with elements representing each season, such as Winter and Spring, then add a condition to each custom group element to display data only for those months in each season. In the image below, which shows a custom group being created in MicroStrategy Web, the Winter custom group element displays data for the months of December, January, and February; the Spring element displays data for March, April, and May; and so on.