Filtering Against Nested Data Fields

DevExpress Data Blog
14 June 2011

Often there is a need to look at complex data in a complex way. A cool new feature I just learned about does just that!

A cool “post-lookup” filtering feature available in our reporting suite allows you to filter the data shown in a report. This little gem can be found by selecting the report smart tag and clicking the ellipsis next to the FilterString property:

smarttag

Lets see how it can be used. Suppose we are building a categorized product report with the following structure:

complexfieldlist

Here we see that categories are at the root of the report with products under each category. Generally filtering data of this nature can be difficult. Enter our FilterString Editor:

complexfilter

Note that you can filter on the top level categories but also the sub-level products as well. This editor also shows you how this would look as a textual filter string:

filterstringtext

Anyone out there using this feature? I’d love to see it in action!

As always, if there are any comments and/or questions, feel free to get a hold of me!

Seth Juarez
Email: sethj@devexpress.com
Twitter: @SethJuarez

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