Using MITS Expression Language (MEL) in STOPLIGHT and TIME.COMPARISON.GRID Boundaries

MITS Expression Language (MEL) can be used to generate boundaries for STOPLIGHT and TIME COMPARISON Grid objects on dashboards and scorecards.

This means, if you want to use a math function or a value from another report to set the threshold for a stoplight or time comparison value, you can do that using MEL.  As long as the MEL expression resolves to a numeric value you can use it when setting a threshold.

There are three type of expressions you can use.  

evalCellNumeric()
This statement will evaluate the included MQL statement and return the value in the lower right most cell.

#{evalCellNumeric('FLASH COFFEEBEAR {RootPath} WITH CPL = "PL1"  CP SALES.Y SALES.Y-1')}

lowestLevelRowCount()
This statement returns the number of rows the included MQL statement

#{evalCellNumeric('FLASH COFFEEBEAR {RootPath} WITH CPL = "PL1" CP SALES.Y SALES.Y-1')}

Math functions
This statement just returns a value based on the results of the math function

Here is an example from the TIME.COMPARISON.GRID that uses the evalCellNumeric() function.

For the lower threshold, we are using the MEL expression:

#{evalCellNumeric('FLASH COFFEEBEAR {RootPath} WITH CPL = "PL1" CP SALES.Y SALES.Y-1')}

And for the upper threshold, we are just using repeating sixes.

When this object is run, MITS will evaluate the MEL expression in the lower threshold by running the FLASH statement enclosed in the MEL expression and using the value returned in the lower right corner of the report as the value for the lower threshold on this object.

You can check this by running the MQL (FLASH) statement on its own to see what the results will be.

Here is an example of a STOPLIGHT using lowestLevelCount():

The MEL Expression used is:

#{lowestLevelRowCount('FLASH COFFEEBEAR {RootPath} WITH CPL = "PL1" CP SALES.Y SALES.Y-1')}