Walkthrough: Cascading Parameter Sheets

Assume that a company needs a simple report which generates an invoice for the orders placed by its customers. The report displays order information such as product, price, and discount, as well as customer information such as Company Name and Customer ID, which the user will enter as parameters.

Walkthrough

If some customers are resellers to whom the company provides a special discount scheme, it will be necessary to display different parameter sheets depending on the type of customer. You can easily create the required conditional prompting sequence with cascading parameter sheets.

Create the following three parameter sheets: 'customers', 'reseller discount', and 'customer discount'.

For information on how to create these kinds of parameter sheets, see Parameter Sheets.

1. The 'customers' parameter sheet is a simple form that accepts some initial customer information. It has some text labels and fields and a Choice element.

 

The Choice element has two choices: 'Customers' and 'Resellers'. The user can choose one and click 'Submit'.

2. The 'reseller discount' parameter sheet accepts some inputs for the reseller details. It has a Choice element which lets the user enter the order quantity.

 

To assign a label and value to the choices, select the Choice element and right-click to open the 'Choice Properties' dialog box. In the dialog box, on the Choice tab, click the 'Advanced' button to open the 'Selection List' dialog box. You can assign labels and values for the list as shown below.

 

3. The 'customer discount' sheet has a different set of inputs.

 

When you link these cascading sheets to a report (discussed next in Using Cascaded Parameter Sheets in a Report), the report is automatically provided with an accumulation of the parameters entered in all of the sheets that are part of the user's selection flow. Therefore, the report will always get all parameters from either the 'customer' and 'reseller discount' sheets or the 'customer' and 'customer discount' sheets, the two possible user selection flows.

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