Every day we face new filter challenges depending on our customer requirements. Sometimes the answer, “it is not possible” seems to be the most logical, but after a few minutes of brainstorming, the solution becomes clear.
Xcelsius became famous thanks to its what-if analysis and filtering options. In this article I want to share the solution of searching and filtering within Xcelsius by using a couple of out of the box components.
This feature allows the user to type part of the text needed for a filter, get the list of values(suggestion), select one of them and get the output in the dashboard.
To build this solution the developer only needs 5 components (the graph, the image and the white background have been added for the demo).
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The input text box is used to write the text to search/filter
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In the excel a “like” command is implemented as =IF(AND($A$1<>"",COUNTIF(A3,"*"&$A$1&"*")>0),1,0) where we are checking if the text written in the cell A1 is contained in A3
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The other components are meant to filter and move the desired value from the source to the destination
The result is the following:
And by clicking on Luca from the list of values, the result is:
The limitation of this solution is that the user has to click on enter after typing the text in the input text box. A better solution could be written using Flex and ActionScript in order to have only one component doing all the work and without the need to press enter at any selection.
If you are interested in seeing the solution source and flash files, feel free to download the samples below. Please let us know if you have any feedback by leaving a comment below.
X-suggestions (swf) X-suggestions (zip file containing xlf)