Tricks of the Trade: Selecting from a Custom List

Contributed by: Teena Paradise of CRH Consulting, Inc.

These steps will allow you to choose only those records which match a list you define without having to be prompted each time you run the report. For example, you regularly run a report that gives you the list of current inpatients. You don’t ever want to see anything but the Med/Surg floors and don’t want to be prompted to enter those locations each time you run the report. In addition to the normal steps in writing a report, follow the following steps:

Step 1: Write a macro to set up your custom list:

The names of the floors above should be changed to reflect the location mnemonics of the floors you wish to include. You may have more or less of them, but please remember to follow the same basic layout. The /FLAG structure is there to insure that this is only done once. The last item is the title you wish to print at the top of the report.

Step 2: Call the macro in the title box on page 1 of the Report Writer

A macro call is formatted as %DPM.reportname.M.macroname(0). Because we are doing this in the Report Title field and the Report Writer is expecting a string of text, we must surround that with “_ and _”. When this “title” is processed, it will actually call the macro. The last thing the macro does is give the actual title of the report and that is how it still prints at the top of each page.

Step 3: Add a select to choose only the values you listed in the macro.

Location is chosen as the field to match in this example, but this would change depending on what criteria you use for your own report. The operator should be LI which stands for List and then we specify that the Report Writer should look on the /LOC structure. If you used a different structure name in your macro, this should be changed to match it. This select is telling the Report Writer to only include rooms where the location of the room matches a location on the list /LOC.