Enhancement Request: Optional Filters in Single-Pass Bursting
K
Kirc Breden
started a topic
about 3 hours ago
Current behavior: When a filter value is supplied to a Web Intelligence report in a single-pass burst and that value is not present in the report data, InfoBurst suppresses an empty report for that recipient. There is no way to designate a filter as optional so it is simply skipped when no value exists.
Requested behavior: Allow each filter on a burst item to be flagged as required or optional. An optional filter with no matching value would be omitted from the filter set rather than applied as a no-match constraint, allowing the report to generate with the remaining filters intact.
Business context: SAP BusinessObjects publications already handle this natively. Profiles assigned to a publication are only applied to recipients who have them; a recipient without a given profile receives the broader, unfiltered slice. InfoBurst’s current model inverts that — a missing value produces nothing instead of everything. For customers migrating from publications to InfoBurst, this is a functional regression that requires workarounds such as conditional source queries to pre-resolve fallback values.
Use case: A BA-level filter is always required. A contract-level filter is optional per recipient. Recipients with a contract value get BA plus contract. Recipients without one get all contracts for their BA. Today that fallback must be engineered in the filter source query; a native optional-filter flag would eliminate that complexity.
Please consider for a future release. Happy to discuss or provide a test scenario.
Kirc Breden
Current behavior: When a filter value is supplied to a Web Intelligence report in a single-pass burst and that value is not present in the report data, InfoBurst suppresses an empty report for that recipient. There is no way to designate a filter as optional so it is simply skipped when no value exists.
Requested behavior: Allow each filter on a burst item to be flagged as required or optional. An optional filter with no matching value would be omitted from the filter set rather than applied as a no-match constraint, allowing the report to generate with the remaining filters intact.
Business context: SAP BusinessObjects publications already handle this natively. Profiles assigned to a publication are only applied to recipients who have them; a recipient without a given profile receives the broader, unfiltered slice. InfoBurst’s current model inverts that — a missing value produces nothing instead of everything. For customers migrating from publications to InfoBurst, this is a functional regression that requires workarounds such as conditional source queries to pre-resolve fallback values.
Use case: A BA-level filter is always required. A contract-level filter is optional per recipient. Recipients with a contract value get BA plus contract. Recipients without one get all contracts for their BA. Today that fallback must be engineered in the filter source query; a native optional-filter flag would eliminate that complexity.
Please consider for a future release. Happy to discuss or provide a test scenario.