Criteria and prompts — filtering your data

Do it

1. Open the Criteria Builder

   On the card you want to filter on, open the action menu (the three dots on the right) and click Add criteria. The Criteria Builder sidebar opens on the right.

   It has two sections stacked top to bottom:

   • Current Criteria — a table of criteria already on this card (empty on first open). Edit (pencil) or delete (trash) rows from here.
   • Edit Criteria — the form where you build a new criterion. Has dropdowns for Logical Filter, Conditional, and Operator, plus a value input that changes shape based on the operator and field type.

   Two buttons matter at the bottom of the Edit Criteria form: Add To Table (commits your current criterion into the Current Criteria table above) and Back. At the very bottom of the sidebar: Cancel and Save & Apply. Save & Apply stays greyed out until you've used Add To Table at least once — that's the cue that catches most first-time users.

2. Build a hardcoded date criterion

   Open Add criteria on a date field — your Open time column is a good candidate. In the Edit Criteria form:

   • Logical Filter: And. (The first criterion is always AND — only later criteria expose OR.)
   • Conditional: Is for "I want rows matching this", or Is Not to exclude them.
   • Operator: Equal. For date fields, Equal opens a list of predetermined date ranges instead of asking you to pick a single date — Today, Yesterday, This Month, Last Month, Last 3 Months, Year to Date, and so on. Type to filter the list ("month" narrows it to just the month-based ranges).
   • Value: pick Last 3 Months (or whatever range you want).

   Click Add To Table. The criterion moves into Current Criteria at the top. Click Save & Apply. The sidebar closes, the preview updates, and the card now shows a criteria badge like ? = [Last 3 Months] — confirmation the filter is active.

   Click View Full Document to confirm the row count dropped. What was 72,000 rows might now be 500 or 5,000.

3. Add a hardcoded character criterion with LIKE

   Open Add criteria on a character field — your Customer column works. The Operator dropdown changes for character fields. Three you'll use most:

   • Equal — pick one value from a list. Use when you want exactly one customer (or status, or category).
   • In List — match against several values. Use when you want exactly two or three known customers.
   • Like — partial-match against a typed pattern. Use when you don't know all the spellings or you want to match a substring.

   For Like, the value field accepts a SQL-style pattern with % as the wildcard:

   • %Groc% — matches any value containing "Groc" anywhere (Shoplite Grocery, Genesis Groceries, Grocery Plus).
   • Groc% — matches values starting with "Groc".
   • %Groc — matches values ending with "Groc".

   The pattern is case-sensitive depending on your data source — some databases treat groc and GROC as the same, others don't. Match the case you see in the data; if you're unsure, try one form, then the other.

   Click Add To Table, then Save & Apply. Two criteria now show on the card (the date filter from step 2 and this character filter), and the preview reflects both.

4. Turn a criterion into a dynamic prompt

   Same card, open Add criteria again. In the Current Criteria table, click the pencil (edit) icon on the criterion you want to make dynamic. The Edit Criteria form re-populates with that criterion's settings.

   At the bottom of the form, two checkboxes:

   • Prompt for Value — check this. The criterion now asks the user for the value at run time instead of using the hardcoded one.
   • Enable Prompt Skipping — leave unchecked unless you want users to be able to skip the prompt and pull every row. Leaving it off forces them to pick — useful as database protection on big tables.

   Click Add To Table (it replaces the existing criterion since you were editing), then Save & Apply.

   Critical step before testing: save the report itself (red Save button → Overwrite). Dynamic prompts only fire when the report has been saved with the prompt in place. If you skip this and click View Full Document, you won't see the prompt — and you'll think it's broken.

   Now click View Full Document. A prompt panel appears asking for the value. Pick one (or leave the predetermined range it suggests), click apply, and the report runs filtered to your choice. A small filter bar appears at the top of the document so users can change their answer without re-opening the prompt.

5. Skip Initial Prompts for a smoother run

   By default, a prompted report opens to its prompt panel and waits for the user to pick. That's fine for one-off runs, but it adds friction if users mostly want to scan first and refine later. Composer has a setting to flip the order: load the report immediately, show the filter bar at the top, let users adjust if they want.

   From the top-right toolbar, click Actions → Settings. Expand Advanced Options. Toggle Skip Initial Prompts. Save & Apply.

   Run the report from the library now — it loads straight to results, with the prompt visible as a filter bar at the top. Users who want to filter further still can; users who just want to scan the default view aren't blocked.

   The Advanced Options panel also surfaces Smart Prompting, which is the dashboard-context cousin of this lesson. It's deliberately out of scope here — covered in Module 11 alongside dashboard filters where it actually shines.