Overview

Writing Report Options into a report gives the user the ability to make their reports dynamic. By writing in a report option the user doesn't have to hard code that information into the report. Since it's using the same report options that get selected before the report runs it will also be consistent if the report options change over time. 

An example of this would be if a user wanted to display at the top of the report the date range the report was being ran for. The report would be setup to prompt the user to input a start and end date and once those were filled in and the report ran. The dates that the user selected would be displayed at the top of the report. And this would change any time a different set of dates were used. 

Details

For the purposes of this article the example we are going to outline will be adding a Start and End date field the top of our report. This will give better context to our end users viewing the report. There will be a clear definition of the time frame the report was ran for. 

Inserting Report Options into the Report

Open the Report Options tab of the Cosmos Task Pane. It will be the first option, identified by a funnel icon. Once the Report Options tab is being displayed the user will see all the Report Options that have been created for the report. 

The next step is to identify and click on the cell where the report option value should be inserted. In our example we want to insert the Start and End dates at the top of our report. So cell B2 has been selected. 

Once the cell has been selected, the user can then write the Report Option into that cell. To do that navigate back over to the Cosmos Task Pane and click Write. If your report option is a range like the one in the example below, you can click on the down arrow next to the Write button to pick from either of the values in the range. In our example we are going to be inserting the Start date first so we'll click on the top date to insert that into cell B2. 

After clicking on Write or selecting the specific value from the dropdown menu, the Report Option should then get inserted into the selected cell. 

The user can follow the same steps as before but this time writing the End date into cell B3. 

If the user wants to change the Report Option value in the report, the user can simply select the cell and click the Write button from another Report Option to replace the value currently in the cell.

If the user wanted to remove the Report Option value from the report, the user can select the cell where the value is being placed and clear out the contents of the cell. The easiest way to do this is to select the cell and then press the Delete key on your keyboard. This will remove the Cosmos function from the cell and the Report Option value will be removed.