Structure Selection
Structure selection provides ways to specify which elements of a list are displayed in an Ad-hoc report. List elements can be selected individually or by reference to their position in a hierarchy (for example, in a hierarchy of regions you could select each member of the European Union individually or you could select them as the children of the parent, Europe). Or, you might select all the elements at one level of the hierarchy plus individual elements at different levels.
In Structure Selection, each element and level of a selected list has a check box. Select the boxes to select individual elements or levels of the hierarchy.
Structure Selection also provides a number of functions.
SeeStructure Selection functions.
These functions are used to select elements according to their position in the hierarchy. An example of a function is Select Children. This displays only the children of a selected parent.
The functions, Select Children, Select Parent and Select Siblings have their own buttons in the Structure Selection toolbar. They can also be selected by right-clicking in the Structure Selection pane.
Selecting elements
To select individual elements or hierarchy levels, select their check boxes in the Structure Selection. Enable the Preview to see the results of your changes before saving them. To enable the Preview, click in the toolbar of the List Designer.
Selecting children, parents and siblings
To select children, parent or siblings of a list element, click the appropriate button in the toolbar of the List Designer and select the element from the Elements list of the Selection Settings section.
Selecting elements by level
To select all elements on a hierarchy level, click and select a level from the menu.
Whole hierarchy
If you select elements in Structure Selection, the check box is enabled. Select it to ignore your selections and use the whole hierarchy in the list. Clear it to use your selections. This can be useful if you have created a complex selection of elements and wish to disable it temporarily, without deleting your selection.
Suppress empty elements
When an element selected in the List Designer refers to an empty cell, #NA is displayed in the report.
Suppress Empty Elements does not remove empty elements from a report. It is a visual aid to help you to avoid selecting elements in the List Designer which do not have data associated with them. Use the button to switch between two views of a list in the Structure Selection pane. One view displays all the elements of the list, the other displays only those elements which are associated with data. In this way you can identify, and exclude from the list, elements which have no data associated with them. Suppress Empty Elements checks the intersection between each element in the dimension selected in the List Designer and the default elements of the other report dimensions. The element in the selected dimension is suppressed if that intersection is empty.
The element is suppressed regardless of whether the default elements are selected in the report or whether the element contains data in other slices. A consequence of this is that elements may be suppressed in the report, even though they do not appear to be empty.
To suppress empty elements:
- Double-click the column or row dimension of an Ad-hoc report
- Click in the toolbar of the Structure Selection pane.
The pane displays only those elements which have data associates with them.
Suppress Empty Elements is also an option in the Choose Elements dialog.