Create custom prompts

Transcript

For those of you familiar with creating filters, using standard props in a report can be relatively easy. Like in this report, you may want to see all requests assigned to the creative team that were due to be completed last month. To select the team, you would change the qualifier to equal, type a few characters in the search bar here, select the creative team, we’ll leave the status prompt on any so you can see all statuses, then select last month for the plan completion date, and run the report.

As I said, this might be pretty easy for people who already know how to create filters in reports, but it can be very confusing for other people. You can improve the user experience by using custom prompts. When you do, it can look like this.

You can create titles in clear language. There are no qualifiers to deal with. You can specify just the options you want. Why doesn’t everyone choose custom prompts for their reports? Well, they are a little more work to set up, but it’s worth the trouble in many cases. We’ll edit this report so you can see how custom prompts are made. Click edit, then report settings, then report prompts.

Here are the custom prompts we created. They consist of a field name, here we name this choose a team, a label name, here we include a label for each of our options, then there’s the condition field for each option. This is the tricky part. It’s written in text mode and it has to be written in a single line. But don’t panic, I’ll show you a shortcut in creating the condition field.

To do this, we’ll add another custom prompt option by clicking on this button.

We’ll add the digital marketing team to the option list. First we’ll type in the name. Now it’s time to type in the text mode code in the condition field that will perform the proper filter to see requests where the digital marketing team is one of the teams assigned. How are we going to figure out how to do this in text mode code? Fortunately, there’s an easy way to do this. You don’t need to know much about text mode to do it, you just need to know where to find it.

We’ll go to another tab and create another issue report. So we’ll go here, create a new report. We have to create the same type of report that we’re putting the custom prompts in, which is an issue report.

And now we’re going to go to the filters, and then create a filter to show all requests where the assignment team’s ID is equal to the digital marketing team. Now click on switch to text mode. And you’ll find where Workfront has created text mode code for your filter.

Before you copy the text mode, there’s one more step you can do here. I mentioned earlier that the condition field in the custom prompt can only accept a single line.

We can edit the code here so it will all fit on a single line. Click on edit text mode.

At the end of the first line, we’ll add an ampersand. The ampersand will be interpreted as a new line code in the condition field. Then we’ll forward delete to bring up the second line.

It’s okay if it wraps here, it only does that for the display. Now we can copy this line and paste it into the condition field in our report. Let’s add one more. We have the last month and this month for the due date options. We’ll add next month. Click on add prompt option, next month. Now we’re going to go back here to our temporary report. We’ve got this in our way now, so we’ll just cancel out of it. We have to say switch to standard mode to get back to the standard mode. It’s warning us that we might lose the work, which we don’t care about at this point. So we’re going to say go ahead. Here’s our previous filter.

We’ll get rid of that and we’ll add one for planned completion date. Choose that and we’ll select next month. Now we switch to text mode again. Edit the text mode. We’ve got three lines to deal with, but that’s fine. You can put in multiple lines here as long as we add that ampersand.

We’ll select the whole thing, copy it, paste it in the condition field.

Now we’re done. We add the prompt.

We make sure that we save and close. And here we have it. We’ve got our digital marketing team.

Our statuses haven’t changed.

And the due date for next month.