How are you deploying your report? Will it be through BusinessObjects/Crystal Reports Server or through your own application? There are a couple of different options for configuring dynamic prompts, but it depends on where/how the report will be run.

-Dell

Ok, the best way to do this is going to be to add some additional unlinked tables to the report and use those for the data for your params.

In this example I'm going to use an Employee table that contains info about a person, including a "DeptID" field that links to a table called Department to get the department description. Assuming I want to give a dynamic prompt which shows department descriptions, here's what I would do:

1. Add a second copy of the "Department" table to the report. Crystal will give you a warning when you do this and then "alias" the table by adding "_1" to the end of the table name.

2. DO NOT link the Department_1 table to any of the other tables in the report. Crystal will tell you this is "generally not supported", but it this is one of the situations where it will work.

3. Create a dynamic parameter. Select {Department_1.DeptID} as the value and {Department_1.Description} as the description. Set the parameter to display the description and, if required, make it multi-select.

4. Set your selection criteria based on the parameter and run the report.

NOTE: It is very important that you do NOT use any fields from Department_1 in the report and that you do NOT use any fields from Department in the parameter! This will keep the two of them totally separate and make it so that the parameter will display data more quickly than when you use data from the report in the parameter.

You can easily set up multiple parameters using this technique.

-Dell