I'm having a heck of a time trying to get my date sliders to do what I want them to do. See the attached example.
1) In my year sliders, is there a more elegant way to do what I'm doing using the expression
if([Fiscal Period] = 'FY',Year) ? This is simular the the challenge of hiding excluded fields in lists boxes using the "Hide Excluded" button.
2) In my quarter sliders I am trying to filter the data based on what years are selected in the year sliders. Is this even possible using the min and max values setting?
Not sure about 1), but I am still trying to understand that. Your CY and FY definition in terms of yearstart seems not to be very different, is it?
2) If I select a period in the year sliders, I do get the bottom two sliders min / max adapted. Doesn't this work at your site?
If you would like to display Quarters, it would be best if your Quarters would also have a numerical representation, you could build your own dual values with both text representation and numerical representation like the other date functions do using dual function and quarterstart function. Do this in the script. Then min() and max() applied to the new Quarter field should just work fine for the slider limits.
1) Fiscal Year Slider - Both sliders are using the same field (Year), which you can see in the table Year is a concatenation of Fiscal Years and Calendar Years. So yes the yearstart looks to be the same (2002) but notice the yearend different 2011 and 2012. Is there a better way to toggle back and forth between two sets of dates possible using an aggr() function as the expression vs. doing what I'm proposing showing/hiding depending on what fiscal periods are chosen.
2) The grain of my calendar is at the quarter level, I do have numerical representations of my quarters the field DateNum. Hopefully you agree with me and that was what you were suggesting above. If so what am I doing wrong in those quarter sliders? I'm using the numerical DateNum as the min and max but still it's only showing numeric data in the sliders.
I think the problem is here that you need to set the value mode on general tab of the slider to numeric/continouus. So the slider gets correct min an max scale, but is free to display the numerical values inbetween. You can only set a Date format on the num tab to convert back to dates, but this is not what you want --> quarters.
If you do a multiselect on field Quarter instead, you are loosing the zoom to the appropriate range set by the year slider.
Are you stuck to the slider object or could you also use something else? Maybe just a formatted listbox will do?
Sfefan first thanks for your help and suggestions. I'm not stuck with a slider but I wanted to try and use it to make our dashboard more "sexy". I did look into going other routes and it looks like a multi-box might be my best option. It's clean and doesn't take up a lot of real estate (see updated example). Notice how I'm hiding/showing the multi-boxes based on the financial period? I've done this in the past basically putting the objects exactly in the same location so end-users don't even know they are actually looking at two objects. Do you have any other clever ways to pull this off? I just want to make sure I'm not doing anything stupid.
What about any other ways to display years/qtrs that I'm not thinking of. I had thought about using a list box but as you can see the multi-box saves on real estate.
