Reports may need to focus on different data sets depending on who is running the report. To this effect the new reporting tool provides the "Ask User Later" option so that individual users can define their own criteria for a given filter. However this has one major drawback, the user cannot choose to ignore one or more filters which are not applicable to their reporting needs. For example, if a report is outputting billing information by account, depending on who is running the report they may want to filter by Account, Invoice, or Rate Plan Charge level information. By building these prompts into the report with the "Ask User Later" when the report is run, the user will get a pop-up something like this: However If a user is only interested in filtering by one of these fields, they cannot populate only one value ignoring the rest. Since all filters must have values (cannot be blank) and select lists do not have an All or None option this issue affects the report regardless of if the filter conditions are set using "AND" or "OR." If the filters are set with "AND" and any of the filter criteria are invalid, such as leaving the Source ID with the default "Enter Text," then the report will not return any results since there are no Bill Runs with the Source ID of "Enter Text." At the same time if the filters are set up using "OR," if any additional filters are valid, such as setting the Billing Batch to "Batch5" but leaving the Invoice Date as "Is during Current Month," it will include results based on all valid filters not just the one needed for the report. In the Old Reporting tool if a value was not set for a filter it was ignored as a condition. Since the new reporting tool requires a value for every filter, the solution here would seem to be to add a checkbox at runtime for each filter which has "Ask User Later" to allow the end user to ignore the filter condition for their report.
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