Date Filters

[#1]

Hi,

In my company we're revisiting some of our older documents to keep all our date filters consistent across the Access Point. Whilst we're doing this i thought it would be a good idea to revisit our template and see how other developers / UI designers create their date filters.

We try and always have a listbox for Year, Quarter and Month. Our company also likes to show YTD, QTD, MTD, WTD and Yesterday as selections. We currently do this through buttons that toggle field values created in our Calendar table, e.g. the field YTD is populated with 1's and 0's for all dates depending on if the date value is in year to date. Do other designers have similar date filter spec from their clients? if so - how do you create your YTD, MTD etc views?

Also - selecting a date period is something our clients are keen on. Does anybody have any advice on how to allow a date period selection?

Adam

[vikasmahajan]

PFA excellent document for ytd and all.

Vikas

[DavidFoster1]

Hi Adam

A good idea for using YTD, MTD filters is to use them to control selections on your main date filters. This has the big advantages of not exposing these obscure fields to end users and it graphically shows the impact on the screen.

Try This: (assumes you have a MONTH field and a ISYTD flag field)

1. Create a button/text box.
2. Create the following actions
   1. Clear Field: MONTH
   2. Filter Field: ISYTD = 1
   3. Select Possible: MONTH
   4. Clear Field ISYTD

[#4]

Hi David,

Thanks for this - very useful.

One issue here is that my data is at Date level and I need YTD (financial starting 01-Apr) and MTD filters.

Once I "Clear Field" ISYTD it leaves the selections of 2013,2014 in "Year" and Apr - Jan in "Month". This leaves months such as Jan 2013 in the selection.

I've added "Select Possible: Date" into the actions too, which I think has got around this.

Do you have any tips on how you format your buttons for this? I'm thinking to try and keep them looking like listbox values (green when selected).

Adam

[vikasmahajan]

you can set as per foll steps

- Go Settings -> Sheet properties -> Triggers -> On activate Sheet -> Field -> Year and value 2014 

So when you come to that sheet you will get 2014 filtered automatically.

Hope this solves your problem

Vikas

[DavidFoster1]

i tend to treat these buttons as shortcuts and dont highlight them, relying on the main list boxes to show the range of dates/months/years/ selected. It sounds like to need to clear all of your date lists before applying the filter and then do select possibles on all the lists to get the effect I described.