Operation Manual

Parameter Fields and Prompts
Creating a parameter with a dynamic prompt
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450 Crystal Reports User’s Guide
This is the text that appears in the “Enter prompt values” dialog box when
the report is refreshed. This example uses “Select a Region.”
9. Click OK.
10. Return to the Field Explorer dialog box, and drag the Region parameter
into your report.
Note: If you don’t want to see the parameter field you dropped in your
report, place it in a section you can suppress, such as a report header or
footer.
When you look at your dynamic prompt within Crystal Reports, it does not
seem to be much different from a static prompt. In the background, however,
Crystal Reports stores the information about the list of values that you created
for this prompt. When you publish the report to BusinessObjects Enterprise,
the list of values becomes a separate entity that you can schedule in the
Business View Manager to ensure that the values are updated on a schedule
that you choose. For example, if you knew that your sales force was rapidly
expanding the regions that your company sells to, you might schedule your
region list of values to be updated every night. Users who run a report that
contains the region list of values will see the new values without you having to
manually update the list (as you would have to do with a static prompt).