Analyticsintermediate
Filters, Prompts & Presentation Variables
Distinguish column filters, dashboard prompts, and presentation variables, and explain how they interact to create dynamic, interactive dashboards.
This trio — filters, prompts, and presentation variables — is what turns a set of static analyses into an interactive dashboard experience, and interviewers use it to check whether you understand the *flow of control* between dashboard UI elements and the underlying queries.
A dashboard prompt is like a thermostat dial in a building's lobby: one dial (the prompt) broadcasts a single target temperature (the presentation variable) that every vent (each analysis) in the building reads and adjusts to, instead of someone manually resetting every single vent by hand.
Key Concepts
1
A filter is a hardcoded (or variable-driven) constraint baked directly into an analysis's criteria — it always applies whenever that analysis runs, regardless of dashboard context. A dashboard prompt, by contrast, is a dashboard-level UI control (dropdown, list of values, date picker, radio buttons) that lets the *user* choose a value at run time; it does not belong to any single analysis but instead broadcasts its selection to every analysis on the dashboard page that's configured to listen for it, via a shared presentation variable.
filterdashboard promptpresentation variable
2
The mechanism: a dashboard prompt is configured to set a presentation variable (e.g., pv_Region) when the user makes a selection, and any analysis's filter that references @{pv_Region}{'Default Value'} will pick up that value automatically when the page refreshes — this is what makes one prompt control filter multiple different analyses/views simultaneously without editing each one. A column prompt is a lighter-weight variant scoped to just the columns being prompted on, directly embedded in an analysis rather than the dashboard, useful when only one report needs the interactivity.
set a presentation variablecolumn promptpv_Region@{pv_Region}{'Default Value'}
3
Interviewers frequently probe the default value syntax (@{variableName}{'default'}) and what happens if a variable is never set (falls back to the default) — and a sharp candidate also mentions is prompted filter operators, which let a filter exist in the criteria (so the column is available for prompting) without hardcoding any actual constraint value until a prompt supplies one.
default value syntaxis prompted@{variableName}{'default'}