December 1st: Required criteria on text only

Notice: Video link in the bottom of article

Required criteria is a great feature in TARGIT.

Originally the main idea behind required criteria was to avoid rendering huge lists - by requiring a certain filter to be applied before we try to fetch the list.

TARGIT users have found another great use for this feature - to make some dashboards really user friendly and nudge the users to select some value before showing them a certain visualization.

It works great in a dashboard like this about the World Cup in football 2022, where the users are prompted to select a country before they can see the relevant information:

After they selected the country, they can see some interesting facts about the country:

You can access the same dashboard here if you want to see the functionality in action: 
https://solutions.targit.com/default.aspx?doc=vfs://Global/World%20Cup%202022/Countries.xview 

However, sometimes you don't want to show data only - maybe you want to show a textbox, but textboxes in TARGIT do not support required criteria - so what to do?

You could add a crosstab instead - work with the crosstab theme and make sure everything in the table itself is transparent in color:

Now you can navigate to the Title tab of the crosstab styling dialogue and add your explanation (in this case, it's just an explanation of some abbreviations.

Now your crosstab will effectively be a text box only showing the title (and crosstabs support required criteria).

Extra tip: Save your setup of the crosstab as a theme - then it will be really fast to use this trick again;