PODCAST 3.20:  A TECHNIQUE FOR DOCUMENTING A REPORT STUDIO REPORT

By Vinay Gupta, Implementation Specialist

It is sometimes a requirement that users have the flexibility to decide what they want to filter a report on. This requirement can be met by providing optional prompts, which allow the users to decide which prompts they want to use. The requirement becomes more complex if the prompts have to be optional while also being mutually exclusive. Though this requirement can also be met by authoring prompts which are placed in conditional blocks and are displayed depending on the user choice, the authoring of such prompts becomes complex.

It is intended to present, through this article, a way to achieve that end result without making the report very complex. Some complexity will be inevitable as the requirement itself is fairly complex. This paper assumes that the reader is able to create reports and prompt pages and prompts. The details and steps for creating the initial report and prompt pages will therefore be omitted.

For detailed steps on how to author multiple mutually exclusive prompts, click here to read the full article.

To get more information on the topic, e-mail us at Newsletter@brightstarpartners.com
 

By Mike Vilhauer, Consultant

This script will allow you to specify text for the first line in a Value Prompt and remove the dashed line that displays on the second line. This has many benefits including allowing the drop down to automatically size to the length of the values available.

To learn how to manipulate value prompts with javascript, click here to read the full article.

To get more information on the topic, e-mail us at Newsletter@brightstarpartners.com
 

DID YOU KNOW...

Extrasolar Planets

An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System. A total of 708 such planets have been identified as of December 5, 2011. It is now known that a substantial fraction of stars have planets, including perhaps half of all Sun-like stars.  It follows that tens of billions of exoplanets must exist in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.

For centuries, many philosophers and scientists supposed that extrasolar planets existed. But there was no way of knowing how common they were or how similar they might be to the planets of our Solar System. Various detection claims made starting in the nineteenth century were all eventually rejected by astronomers. The first confirmed detection came in 1992, with the discovery of several terrestrial-mass planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12 The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star was made in 1995, when a giant planet was found in a four-day orbit around the nearby star 51 Pegasi. Due to improved observational techniques, the rate of detections has increased rapidly since then. Some exoplanets have been directly imaged by telescopes, but the vast majority have been detected through indirect methods such as radial velocity measurements.

Most known exoplanets are giant planets believed to resemble Jupiter or Neptune. That reflects a sampling bias, since massive planets are easier to observe. Some relatively lightweight exoplanets, only a few times more massive than Earth, are known as well; statistical studies now indicate that they actually outnumber giant planets. Planetary-mass objects also exist that orbit brown dwarfs or that "float free" in space, although strictly speaking the term "planet" may not be applicable to them.

The discovery of extrasolar planets has intensified interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Several giant planets are now known that orbit in their star's habitable zone. Among the candidates are Gliese 581 d and HD 85512 b. In December 2011, NASA confirmed that 600-light-year distant Kepler-22b, at 2.4 times the radius of Earth, is potentially the closest match to Earth in terms of both size and temperature.

- Wikipedia (2011)