There are situation where you are looking to build a dashboard in SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio and you do require a time based filtering scenario.
You will notice that Design Studio out of the box does not provide any component focused on such a workflow. You have the "usual" candidates for filtering data, but nothing that is focused on a time based / period based scenario.
This is where the Period Selectos as part of the Visual BI Extensions can help.
Here are two of our common used Period Selectors
So why are they unique (and patented) ? Because they allow your business user to quickly select a month, a quarter, or a year and in case of the Multi-Select option they even allow to select across multiple years - so comparing for example your revenue across several years in Q1 becomes something that is just a few clicks away.
In addition the period selectos also allow to specify the return format:
In this scenario you can choose from a list of predefined formats but you can also specify your own return format using the typical abbreviations such as MM for a two digit month or YYYY for a four digit year.
If you are interested in time based filtering and want to provide your users with a easy to use and simple experience and save yourself from writing lots of scripting code - these components can be a great help.
100 Things you can do with Visual BI Extensions and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio