Attribute Form Qualifications

Attribute forms are additional descriptive information about a business attribute. Most attributes only have the forms ID and Description. But an attribute can have many other forms. For example, the attribute Customer has the forms First Name, Last Name, Address, Email Address, and so on. A form is a descriptive category for any data your organization saves about any of its attributes.

Attribute form qualifications allow you to filter report data based on an attribute form. For example, to return data for only those customers whose last names start with the letter H, you can create an attribute form qualification defined with the form Last Name, the operator Begins With, and the letter H as the value.

Attribute form qualification example

A report includes the revenue, cost, and profit for all employees. You want to view the data of only those employees whose last name begins with the letter B. To do this, create a filter that qualifies on the Last Name form of the attribute Employee. The steps to create this attribute form qualification are listed below. The example after the procedure shows what happens to report data when the filter is used on a report.

Creating a filter based on business attribute forms

This procedure creates an attribute form qualification based on the example described above. It uses the sample MicroStrategy Tutorial project.

To filter data based on business attribute forms

1. In MicroStrategy Web, on the Home page, click New Filter. The New Filter page opens.
2. In the pane on the left, navigate to the attribute whose form you want to filter a report's data by. Alternatively, type the name of the attribute in the Find field.
3. Right-click the attribute and select Add to Filter. You can also drag and drop the attribute to the right pane.

The right pane displays fields similar to the image below:

For this Tutorial example, choose Employee.

4. To create the list of forms that the filter will use to filter data, perform the following steps:

1. Select Qualify.
2. From the first drop-down menu, select the form you want to filter data based on.

For this tutorial example, click Last Name.

3. From the next drop-down menu, select the operator that describes how you want to filter the data.

For this Tutorial example, click Begins With.

4. In the last field, type the value to use to qualify on the attribute form. This is the value that will be compared against the data in your data source.

Depending on the operator you have selected, you may need to enter multiple values. For example, the operator Between requires two values.

For a date attribute form, you can compare the form to a dynamic date, which is a fixed offset of the current date, such as one month ago. For more information on dynamic dates, see the Advanced Reporting Guide.

For this tutorial example, type B.

5. Click Apply to create your filtering condition.
6. Click Save As. The Save As dialog box opens.
7. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the filter. Type a Name and Description for the filter.

For this Tutorial example, name the filter Employee Last Name = B and save it in the My Objects folder.

5. Click OK. Your new filter is saved.