Change to Report Engine Filter Logic

We've made a change to how filters work in Shopperations.

Please read below for important information that may impact your saved reports. You can also watch the video walkthrough here. 

The most important things to know

How do filters work now? 

Filters will only include the items that you explicitly check in the Filter popup. New items (products, tactics, event names, budget names, fiscal years, vendors, etc.) that didn't exist when the original report was created will not be automatically included.

 

What are the implications? 

When you refresh an old report, the results may be different than before (specifically,  If you relied on filters to dynamically include new values, they will no longer do so.

 

What do you need to do? 

If you plan to refresh an old report (with filters) that was created prior to this change, you must double-check the filter settings to ensure that the data you are looking for is included.

 

Background information:

 

How did filters work in the past? 

They used to pull in all new values that were added to the database regardless of the original filters saved in your report. For instance, a new fiscal year was added to the report automatically on refresh, even if your report filtered to a single fiscal year originally.

 

Why did we change the way filters work? 

This dynamic filter update was confusing because it happened behind the scenes without user involvement. Many reports that were filtered to look at a limited scope would return unwanted results upon refresh, because they included newly created values from the database.  This filtering logic was also inconsistent with data reporting best practices.

 

When did the change occur?

February 20, 2023

 

What if I liked the old logic? 

If you like the old logic where new values were pulled in automatically - for instance, you only excluded Blank event names or blank budget names - you can still do that with the "Exclude" check box in the same filter pop-up. Exclude logic in filters will save what items you do not want to see and will ignore them on refresh. All other values, old and new, will not be excluded.