Display Selected Filters on Your Report

The BI Tool allows you to display the filters selected by a user on your report. We highly recommend doing this for every report. Otherwise, if printed, the report could be misinterpreted and misused since there would be no way of knowing which filters had been selected.

Similarly, it is crucial to display the name of the user who generated the report, and the date/time the report was generated. Since BI Tool reports automatically respect student visibility, who generates the report dramatically affects what data will be displayed. Since these reports are dynamic, the date/time the report is generated can also affect the data displayed.

The Easy Way

The easy way to do this is to use the jrxml files below as your template. Whenever you start a new report, create a copy of this report. Then, all those parameters and the text fields will already be there for you.

Please right click on the links and select "Download file".

Generic Template with Parameters for Filters Landscape

Generic Template with Parameters for Filters Portrait

Please be sure to install the Illuminate Font Set so the templates will display correctly.

You can either start your reports using these templates, OR you can simply copy and paste the parameters (you'll find the parameters in the outline of the report) and the text fields from our template into your own report.

Of course, when you preview the report in JSS, those parameters will always be blank, but when you run the report in Illuminate, it will display the filters the user has selected.

These templates also include page footers that display the name of the user who generated the report, and the date/time the report was generated. You can also copy and paste these into your own report if necessary.

The Manual Way

To do this manually, you need to create a specific paramater for each filter that is available to users when they run the report -- and there are a lot of them! Those parameters, then, need to be displayed on your report.

Here are all the parameters you need to create (the ones that are greyed out; those are default parameters):

Then you need to add a text field in your report to actually display the parameters. I typically use two separate text fields so they can be in two columns, and (as always) you have to be careful of potential null values. You'll see that in my expressions below. (The expressions are also using simple html for formatting.)