In this post, I’ll talk about how to add a drop down filter to a newly created PerformancePoint dashboard.  This is a follow up to the BI presentation that Mike McLean and I delivered at the Project Conference last week.

So we now have two reports created as PerformancePoint reports.  I added the Resource List as a Background item – which allows me to hook into it for any of the filters I may add to the dashboard.

Creating a Filter

Within PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer, select the option to create a new filter.

Out of the available options, I’ll pick the Member Selection option.  That pulls the list of available members from the OLAP cube we’re using as the data source.

Select the Resource List as the filtered dimension.

Select the members to include in the filter.  You can deliberately select specific resources or right click and select all members.

At the end, the filter should look as follows:

Click Next to identify how you wish the filter to appear.

Rename and save the resulting filter.  By default, the filter will be saved to the PerformancePoint content library on the BI Center.

Now it’s time to throw this all together onto a dashboard.

Creating the Dashboard

Creating a dashboard is as simple as selecting the option in the Create tab of the Ribbon in Dashboard Designer.

Select the template for the first page.

This creates a new dashboard in the workspace.  Change the name to something useful and save it to create the item in the content library.

Available items appear in the Details section on the right.  Drag and drop those items into the relevant section within the dashboard.  To pull new items into the workspace, select the Add Lists option in the Home tab.

Select the items to add, i.e. reports that have already been created, and select Add Items to include them in the workspace.  These items may now be added to the dashboard.

Going back to the dashboard, I modify the page list to create two pages within the dashboard.  I can always go back and edit the dashboard with Dashboard Designer.

Now, it’s a matter of dragging and dropping from the Details items on the right.  Note that I added the filter we created to the top row.

From there, all we have to do is connect the Webparts by dragging the correct fields from the filter.  That launches the Connection dialog.

Repeat the process for both of the reporting Webparts that we’re adding.

The page is now ready.  To deploy to a SharePoint site, right click on the left and select the option to deploy the dashboard.  Note that the author must have rights to deploy dashboards to the specific target library.

After it’s deployed, the page should render correctly.  You now have a dashboard that may be controlled with the filter criteria defined by the user:

Next up….filtering automatically based on the current user.