1. Visualizing Data and Building Reports in Oracle Analytics Cloud
  2. Visualize Data
  3. Filter Your Data
  4. About Filters and Filter Types

About Filters and Filter Types

Oracle Analytics supports many types of filter to enable you to focus on the data in which you're interested in visualizations, canvases, and workbooks.

The Range, List, Date, and Expression filter types are specific to either a visualization, canvas, or workbook. Filter types are automatically determined based on the data elements you choose as filters, but you can also switch to select another compatible filter type.

  • Date filters - Use calendar controls to adjust time or date selections. You can either select a single contiguous range of dates, or you can use a date range filter to exclude dates within the specified range.

  • Expression filters - Let you define more complex filters using SQL expressions.

  • List filters - Applied to data elements that are text and date data types, and number data types that can't be aggregated. List filters are applied to the whole canvas or to a specific visualization on the canvas.

  • Range filters - Generated for data elements that are number data types and that have an aggregation rule set to something other than none. Range filters are applied to data elements that are measures, and that limit data to a range of contiguous values, such as revenue of $100,000 to $500,000. Or you can create a range filter that excludes (as opposed to includes) a contiguous range of values. Such exclusive filters limit data to noncontiguous ranges (for example, revenue less than $100,000 or greater than $500,000).

  • Relative Time - Focus on values for a specified time period relative to today. For example, focus on the last three years, the next three years, or year to date.

  • Top and bottom filters - Applied to measure and attribute data elements. You can specify whether to filter by top or bottom, specify the number of items to display, and which measure or attribute to limit by.

About Filtering Data in Workbooks

  • If you've applied role-based filters to a dataset, workbook users only see data to which they've been give access. For example, users with the application role North American Analyst will only see North American sales data when they open a shared global sales workbook.
  • If your workbook contains multiple datasets and some aren’t joined, then there are restrictions for how you can use filters.
  • Any visualization that doesn't use the data element of an active filter is grayed out.
  • You can't specify data elements of a dataset as a filter of another dataset unless the datasets are joined.
  • To select an alternative filter type for date or time filters, click the filter and select a different type. For example, for a Month element you might change the filter type from Date Range to List to focus in on individual months.