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Altair® Monarch®

 

Overview: Filters

Filters provide a means of selecting specific records and ignoring the rest. You can use filters to explore your data by limiting the available records to only those that match your specifications. When you apply a filter to a table, Monarch Classic examines each record in the table. Records that "pass" the filter criteria are displayed and all other records are temporarily ignored, i.e., not  displayed.

For example, you have a table that lists transactions for a distributor of classic music recordings. Transactions are included for each customer and are broken down by media type, including CDs, SACDs, and DVDs. In all, there are 149 records in the database table, a lot to dig through.

Suppose, for example, that you are interested in the transactions for a particular customer, such as Betty’s Music Store. You can use a filter to display the records for Betty's Music Store and ignore the rest. You can use another filter to see only the records for a particular media type, such as SACDs. This filter would return 10 records representing sales of SACDs to 9 different customers. By combining the two filters, you can display only the sales of SACDs to Betty’s Music Store (there is only one such sale).

Monarch Classic allows the creation of the following filter types:

  • Formula-based filters: These filters utilize an expression with a field, an operator, and a specific, set value. Records that meet the filter expression's criteria will be selected and displayed in the table, while all other records will be filtered out, i.e., will not  be displayed. See Creating Formula-Based Filters for more information.

  • Value-based filters: A value-based filter consists of one specified field along with a set of one or more specific field values. Records that contain the specified values in the selected field will be displayed, while all other records will be filtered out. See Creating Value-Based Filters for more information.

  • Compound filters: These filters can be comprised of two or more formula-based filters, two or more value-based filters, two or more compound filters, or any combination of the three filter types. See Creating Compound Filters for more information.