Prompt Page

[Anonymous]

Hello Everybody,

Is there anything called prompt page like we have in SSRS or Cognos that user can have choices before he sees report output....??

Can we build it using some filter visualizations...??

[MattAllington · Accepted solution]

My advice is this.  Don't try to do it the way you have done it in the past with your old systems.  Instead think abou the problem and then try to solve the problem with the new tools you have.  eg.  Problem:  User needs to select what the report shows.  Solution:  you have report filters, slicers, cross filtering etc.

Give it a go with this mind set - you will be amazed.

[nagabhushan]

Hi Matt,

I had a similar request and like to know if there is any Dynamic filtering in PowerBI that gets applied before the Query is fired to DB.

If I don't force the User to select the Parameter values, it first tries to bring more than 100 million rows from SAP HANA DB as my Report contains the DB fields at lowest grain and so if I cannot have dynamic filtering, the Dashboard will not populate even after 24 hours.

Report, Page level and Visual filters gets applied after the data is pulled into the Report or Dashboard and this is as per my understanding of PowerBI.

Please advise.

Thanks,

Nag.

[MattAllington]

The general pattern for Power BI is that you (the report author) should load the data, not the end user.  So if you don't want 100 million rows in your report, then write a query that returns less rows.  But don't expect the end user to do this.  One alternative is to create a template and set up parameters, but personally I am not a fan of that approach.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deep-dive-into-query-parameters-and-power-bi-templates/

[reneincer]

Sometimes I prefer the prompt page,

Suppose you have 5000 users running 10 reports per day, and 3 of them, are reports that performs realtime heavy calculations. Suppose the reports take just 1 minute. So, 5000 * 3 = 15000 minutes processing time lost.

I plan to move Excel reports with macro and stored procedures to PowerBI, and the prompt page could be a good feauture.

[KHorseman]

Anything that you're doing that currently takes 3 minutes to calculate every time a user tries to load a report is probably something that can be done more efficiently in a different way. Likely involving a data warehouse.

In any case you can write measures to use disconnected slicers that allow users to pick a number. The measure can use the selected number in the slicer as a variable and feed it into a TOPN function perhaps as a method of limiting a number of records.

[ranjan2000]

Hi 

Understand that there are different level of reporting. For operational reports, you should have prompts (why kill db) and for analytical reports you might bring most part of the data ( get the haystack) and then look for the needle. Power BI is not a operational BI tool. 

Thanks

RP

[nagabhushan]

Hi Matt,

I had a similar request and like to know if there is any Dynamic filtering in PowerBI that gets applied before the Query is fired to DB.

If I don't force the User to select the Parameter values, it first tries to bring more than 100 million rows from SAP HANA DB as my Report contains the DB fields at lowest grain and so if I cannot have dynamic filtering, the Dashboard will not populate even after 24 hours.

Report, Page level and Visual filters gets applied after the data is pulled into the Report or Dashboard and this is as per my understanding of PowerBI.

Please advise.

Thanks,

Nag.