Adding a prompt to a metric's definition pane in the Metric Editor

Before You Begin

A prompt is a question the system presents to a user during report execution. How the user answers the question determines what data is displayed on the report when the results are returned from your data source. Prompts are an effective way to design a single report that can support a broad user audience, since each user can designate the specific information that they want to see.

The following table describes how you can add different prompt types to a metric.

Prompt Type	Metric Component
Object prompts Allows users to select which MicroStrategy objects to include in a report, and determine the definition of the report filter.
Object prompt of attributes	Metric formula Metric level
Object prompt of filters	Metric formula Metric condition
Object prompt of metrics	Metric formula
Value prompts Allows users to enter a single value or string.
Numeric prompts Big Decimal prompts Long prompts	Metric formula
Level prompts Allows the user to select, during report execution, the level of calculation for a metric.
Level prompts	Metric level

For a description of the metric components, see About metrics.

Prerequisites

This procedure assumes that the prompt has already been created.

• To create an object prompt, see Filtering based on metrics, attributes, or other objects: Object prompts.

• To create a value prompt, see Filtering based on a single value or string: Value prompts.

To add a prompt to a metric's definition in the Metric Editor

1. Open the Metric Editor:

   • If you are creating a new metric, in MicroStrategy Developer, select File, point to New, and then Metric. If you are using Object Templates, the New Metric dialog box is displayed before the Metric Editor opens. Click the Empty Metric icon.

   • If you are adding the prompt to an existing metric, in MicroStrategy Developer, navigate through the Folder List to locate the metric to modify. Open the metric by double-clicking its name or icon.

2. You can add prompts to the metric formula, condition, and level, as described in the table above. Use the Object Browser on the left to locate the prompt that you want to add to the metric's definition.

   • For steps to define the metric formula, see Creating a simple metric.

   • For steps to define the metric's conditionality, see Setting metric conditionality.

   • For steps to define the metric level, see Specifying metric levels.

3. Click Save and Close to save your filter and close the Filter Editor.

You can now add the prompted metric to any report, as described in Designing a report.

If you want to see what your report looks like when executed against the data source, and if you want to see how a prompt works for a user, once your report has one or more attributes and metrics in it, from the View menu select Grid View.