Prompt Page Static Choices - cognos

Question

I am trying to create a prompt on my prompt page to let the user select a specific quarter. for example, the user would select "2018 Q1" from a prompt and the report would know that the dates for "2018 Q1" are between 7/1/2018 and 9/30/2018. Is this possible to do? I have been messing with the static choices, but I am not getting very far.
My Cognos knowledge would be classified as general.

Answer 1

There are a couple ways to do that. You didn't indicate whether you want the choices offered the user in the prompt to be dynamic. Dynamic prompts usually provide a better customer experience and require less maintenance. I'll explain how to do dynamic and if you want static, simply hand enter the values into the prompt rather than source them from a query. The rest of the instructions apply.
Dynamic (preferred)
Create a new query
Name the query something that indicates its function, e.g. 'Quarter Prompt'
Within the query create a new data item to contain what you want the prompt to display to the user.
For example, if you wanted the prompt to show "2018 Q1" you might create this string from a Date table like so:
[Year] + ' Q' + [Quarter]
If you generate the tabular data for this query you will get a list of all year/quarter combinations in your date table:
2018 Q1
2018 Q2
2018 Q3
2018 Q4
2017 Q1
...
Constrain the list to only the range of quarters you want to prompt for.
For instance, if you wanted to only show quarters in the current year you'd add this filter:
[Year] = year(current_date)
After adding this filter you will only see the first four rows of the above output returned. Your users will be given four choices to choose from.
Set the value prompt's Query property to the new query and set both the Use Value and Display Value properties to the data item you defined in the prompt query
To apply the prompt choice to your report, you simply add a filter to the relevant report query that takes the input from the user and compares it against the data:
[Year] + ' Q' + [Quarter] = ?quarterPrompt?
Now, this way of doing it has some potential performance inefficiencies. In order to apply the filter each row will have to be examined, converted into the string format and compared. If you need better performance a better way to do the filter is as follows:
[Year] = substring(?quarterPrompt?,1,4) AND [Quarter] = substring(?quarterPrompt?,7,1)
Since we are only transforming the prompt, which contains only one value and not many, the performance is optimized.
Addendum
My intuition was telling me that there might be an even better way. After poking around, I realized that there's an even more efficient way to handle this by eliminating all string parsing. Here's the parts of the procedure to be amended:
You need to add a new data item as the Use Value passed into the report query.
Create a second data item in the prompt query with the following expression:
[Year] * 100 + [Quarter]
For every year and quarter combination you will now have a number that encodes the combination. For instance, for year 2018 and quarter 2 the new data item will return 201802.
Change the prompt properties. Point the Use Value to the newly created data item.
Change the filter in the report query to use the new numerical value
This would look something like the following:
floor(?quarterPrompt?/100) = [Year]
AND mod(?quarterPrompt?,100) = [Quarter]
This numerical-only operation has the potential to have better performance than the substring-based parsing in the original answer, yet has the same effect.