Need “All” as a Choice for Your Dynamic Prompt?

This post was kindly contributed by Business Intelligence Notes for SAS® BI Users - go there to comment and to read the full post.

Author: Tricia Aanderud

What I like the most about the dynamic prompts available for the stored process and SAS Enterprise Guide is that a lot of the work is done for you. For instance, some prompts have built-in error checking and a built-in selection for selecting all values. Without a doubt it’s one of the better product features.

I think that’s why the SAS BI Dashboard Dynamic Prompt seemed a little lacking. In fact, one of the questions I am asked most frequently about that indicator “How do I make it select all variables?“ I’m so happy to see that this indicator was fixed in SAS 9.4!

Adding “All” to the Dynamic Prompt

The Dynamic Prompt indicator had two noticeable changes: 1 – Add a Prompt Label and 2 – Include (All) selection. You can now add a label to the front the prompt, as shown in the figure. I added “Select a value:”, which you can see was appended to the front of the indicator. Then you just check the box if you want the All available as a selection. Other than selecting the checkbox, I didn’t do anything else to my data.

Note: Also notice how the SAS BI Dashboard tool has a new look. Hmmm … it looks more like the SAS Visual Analytics tool. Coincidence?

But there’s a downside as well at least with the multiple line chart. When the user selects the value, the indicator appears to Zoom instead of redrawing the chart. All of the sudden the USA sales trend looks a lot more dramatic compared to when it was shown with all the other countries. It’s because the Y-Axis changed so that 0 was no longer the baseline value.

My preference would be that the Y-axis did not change. Another preference would be that it either default to (all) when you open the dashboard or that there is an option to allow it to be the default. Poor SAS Development team.. their work is never done. 😉

Still on a Prior Release?

If you have not yet adopted the new release, then you can manually mimic the All option. For instance, in the example above it was the sales by quarter for the Actual Sales by Country. In this case, I would have had to pre-summarized the data and added a row for the “All” choice. Here’s how the data would have looked so you get the idea.

This workaround would also solve the issue noted above. By adding the “All” choice to the variable, you can avoid using the Include (All) Selection check box.

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