Patent ID: 7293008

Claim:
A method of producing a business report from data contained in a computer based business intelligence system having a report authoring tool, the method comprising the steps of: producing a report layout containing one or more macrotized database language expressions; defining a parameter map having one or more keys and one or more field names, the one or more keys being associated with the one or more field names; accepting from a user one or more user inputs; modifying the one or more macrotized database language expressions, including: producing, from the one or more macrotized database language expressions in dependence upon the one or more user inputs and the parameter maps, one or more valid database language expressions for a database query, the one or more valid database language expressions containing at least one of the one or more field names; and applying the one or more valid database language expressions to one or more databases, including: retrieving the data from the one or more databases based on the one or more valid database language expressions to produce the business report.