You can assign screening conditions to a data source, independent of a request, and activate these screening conditions for use in report requests against the data source.

A filter is a packet of definitions that resides at the file level, containing WHERE and/or IF criteria. Whenever a report request is issued against a data source, all filters that have been activated for that data source are in effect. WHERE or IF syntax that is valid in a report request is also valid in a filter.

A filter can be declared at any time before the report request is run. The filters are available to subsequent requests during the session in which the filters have been run.

Filters allow you to:

• Declare a common set of screening conditions that apply each time you retrieve data from a data source. You can declare one or more filters for a data source.
• Declare a set of screening conditions and dynamically turn them on and off.
• Restrict access to data without specifying rules in the Master File.

Simply declaring a filter for a data source does not make it active. A filter must be activated with a SET command.

For a complete description of filters, see the Creating Reports With WebFOCUS Language manual.