Communication between widgets

In Infor BI Application Studio you can use variables to link reports. For example, use variables to ensure that a date filter selected in one report is automatically selected when you open another. But dashboards display multiple reports; some of which need to react to changes in other reports, and some of which do not. If you use only variables to link reports, you must refresh the entire dashboard to update the linked reports. To refresh the linked reports on a dashboard, use report parameters, in addition to variables, when designing reports.

Report parameters

Reports are linked if their parameters:

Have the same names. That is, they refer to the same variable.
Have different names but refer to the same look-up.

Note: Report parameters must be of either Element or Tuple type.

WebView parameters

WebViews can also have parameters. You can link WebViews to report widgets and to other WebViews on a dashboard by creating parameters from parts of their URLs.

See: Creating and editing VebView widget parameters

Parameter connections

The parameters of multiple widgets can form a parameter connection. For example, if two or more widgets have Location and Month parameters, there are two possible parameter connections. You could add some or all widgets to either, or both connections. For example, to link widgets by location, add the location parameter of each widget to the Location parameter connection.

By default, links between report widgets are detected automatically and the parameter connections created. You can turn off auto-detection and create connections manually.

See: Creating parameter connections.

Note: Connections between report widgets and WebViews are not automatically detected and must be created manually.

By default, when you save a dashboard, the values of the parameter connections are saved with it. Those values are selected each time you open the dashboard and are unaffected by changes to the source report in the report catalog. But sometimes you will want changes in the source report to affect the dashboard values: for example if the source report is configured to update daily.

The leading widget

You can turn off storage by selecting a leading widget for the connection from the Initial Value list. The value of a leading widget drives the values of the other widgets in the connection when the dashboard loads. If there are parameters which are not used in a parameter connection you can specify whether their values are stored in the dashboard or set by the widget.

Note: A WebView cannot be the leading widget of a parameter connection.

If the leading widget is removed from a dashboard, the initial value automatically reverts to 'stored in dashboard'.