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Analytics > Designing an Analysis > Step 3: Defining Analytics Prompts (Optional)

Step 3: Defining Analytics Prompts (Optional)

To allow users to specify a filter value when they run an analysis, define a run-time prompt for the analysis. Runtime prompts are useful because analyses may need to be filtered differently based upon different users or the dates that analyses are run.

A runtime prompt differs from a prebuilt filter in that a filter is set up when the analysis is defined and cannot be changed without revising the analysis itself. For example, if you define a prompt on Account Type for the report, your employees are prompted to select which Account Type value to see when they run the analysis. If you define the prebuilt filter as a specific Account Type, such as Competitor, the filter is hard-coded and cannot be altered by the user at run time.

You can create prompts on the Prompts tab.

There are two types of prompts that you can create:

• Column filter prompt

  A column filter prompt provides general filtering of a column within an analysis. A column filter prompt can present all choices for a column, or, it can present constrained choices for a column. For example, if an analysis contains a Region=East filter, constraining choices for the City column restricts the selections to cities in the East region only. This eliminates the selection of a mutually exclusive filter that could result in no data.

• Image prompt

  An image prompt provides an image that users click to select criteria for an analysis. For example, in a sales organization, users can click their territories from an image of a map to see sales information, or click a product image to see sales information about that product. Users who know how to use the HTML <map> tag can create an image map definition.

Related Topics

See the following topics for related information:

• Adding Column Filter Prompts in Analytics
• Adding Image Prompts in Analytics