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Salesforce is a leading brand name among the CRM companies out there. No doubt some of you might have tried to filter reports before submission. In case you don’t know, identifying a record without another related record is often regarded as an exception report. There might be a situation where you need to analyse the Customer accounts in the past quarter, or maybe upcoming activities for the week. All of this can be easily managed using the Cross Filters.
This post will help you to understand the basics of Cross Filters and how to implement them for your benefit.

What are Cross Filters?

Cross Filters are an essential part of creating a more sophisticated report without making the use of custom report types. It helps to develop a better report for submission, especially if you are a Salesforce admin. Many of you might be thinking, what was the need of introducing Cross Filter in the system? Well for that, you first need to understand its function.
Everyone knows for a fact that not only in Salesforce, but also in other database management systems you have something called related records. In other words, many objects are related to a single object. For Instance,

  • Tasks related to Accounts
  • Accounts related to Contacts
  • Opportunities related to Accounts

All these types of similar records are often difficult to manage and consume a lot of time while report submission. This is where the role of Cross Filters comes into play. Whenever a Cross Filter is associated with a record, it not only enables you to search the parent directory but also search for records present in the connected child database.

How to Create Cross Filters?

For reference purpose, we will take an example of Opportunity report. There are some products available that are associated with the Opportunities. We will try to create a Cross Filter for the purpose of finding Opportunities without Products.
Note: If you want to display some records from the child database, try to make an Opportunities with Products report.
Create a new Opportunity report as shown below:
Cross Filters in apex
 
If by any means the option to create Cross Filters is greyed out, you won’t be able to create them. The reason can be that your company might have turned this feature off. Make sure that the create option is available to be used before you proceed with the further steps.
Click on the “Add Cross Filter” option and you will see this tab opening on your screen.
Cross Filter
As we move further, you are directed to a new filter section of the page. Here you can clearly see that it allows you to set the required Parent & Child records. You can set up to 3 levels of filtering procedures for your records.
Now as you want to include the child records or not, choose the options likewise. Everything is decided by the “With” or “Without” options in the dropdown. As the name suggests, you can find the records containing individual child data using the “With” option. On the contrary, if the records should not contain them, use the latter option.
After all the changes are made, click the Apply button. All the required records (in this case, Opportunities without Products) will appear on the screen. You can see that the manual work was reduced to a minimum and everything was done by the Cross Filters.

Limitations of Cross Filters

Anything can’t be perfect and will have some flaws. Cross Filters also sets you back in a few key points like,

  • You can’t apply more than 3 cross filters per report
  • Cross Filters will affect the overall speed of the report
  • Only a limited number of sub-filters can be applied (maximum of 5)
  • Cross Filter is not available for Professional or Group Licenses

Final Verdict

Salesforce has many tools and Cross Filter is one of the most popular and useful tools among them. Once you are comfortable using them, they will save you a lot of time and reduce the load.  Make sure you examine the results once they are separated. It will help you to determine if there is any mistake while applying the Cross Filters. Once you are sure about everything, submit your report before the deadline.
Check out more about cross filters: https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=reports_cross_filters_create.htm
Here is the link to previous pages: https://mytutorialrack.com/javascript-developer-certification/
 

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