Dashboards and Widgets Creation Guide - MicroStrategy

4
Providing Interactivity to Users: Selectors Dashboards and Widgets Creation Guide
calculated by adding the Central and Mid-Atlantic values for each year, and
only one row for each year is displayed in the Grid/Graph, as shown below:
Other important differences between filtering and slicing selectors are
described below:
• Slicing allows the total to be displayed as an item in the selector. A
filtering selector does not display the total as a selector item. (For
background information on selector totals, see Showing totals for
selectors, page 163.)
• Slicing allows you to specify that the selector automatically uses a default
selection when other changes in the dashboard cause the selection made
by the user to return no data. Default selections are not available for
filtering selectors. (For background information on default selections, see
Determining how the target of a selector displays when no data exists,
page 149.)
• Slicing is performed on Intelligence Server in Express Mode in
MicroStrategy Web and on the client in Flash Mode in MicroStrategy
Web. Filtering is performed on the Intelligence Server in both modes.
This means that when a user chooses different items in a selector, a call is
made to the web server to update the document, except when a slicing
selector is used in Flash Mode. In that case, the web server is not called,
which can make the document run faster as users change selections. In
contrast, a filtering selector can speed up the initial load time of a
document in Flash Mode, since all the slices do not need to be initially
downloaded to the client. However, when a filtering selector targets a
panel stack, all static content, dynamic text fields, and links in the target
panel are copied and sent to the client for every new slice of data. To
maximize performance, MicroStrategy recommends removing all content
that is either static or independent of the selector out of the target panel.
• If a selector is sliced, you can define the current state, which determines
how the target is displayed when the dashboard is executed. The target
can display all the selector items, a specific number of the first items, or a
128 Applying selections as filters or slices © 2012 MicroStrategy, Inc.