One other thing, as I've been thinking about this. Your #2 method above is something that does work, but I don't think it'll help you shrink your pull down.
You can do that by setting values to the input anchors in the tool. I'm sure you've probably figured this out, but I've attached screenshots of an example of how this works.
Once you attach the variables to the input anchor, go to the WHERE clause tab and click "Edit Parameters" and then "Add Scalar" to add the runtime parameters.
Then in your WHERE clause editor, you should then be able to add the parameters
The problem here is that this works if you're filtering on a range of values, (works fantastic on date ranges). However, if you are looking for very specific values, this doesn't really work in that situation. If you have specific values that you're looking to filter, you need an IN statement in your WHERE clause. One way to get around that in Theobald is to use the batch macro functionality. One caveat, is that this method stops working if you're looking for more than 25,000 individual records, so it may not assist you with this specific issue, but it is handy to understand. I've put my basic batch template macro in this post, and a quick walkthrough using the example of finding specific inbound delivery information by delivery number from table LIKP.
I started doing this before Theobald added input anchors to their tools, and this is how I still pass the majority of my parameters into these extractions. I've attached my basic batch macro workflow, this is my template file for starting all of these. You need to configure this for your connection, and then there are few minor things to do. I will go through this with the example of pulling inbound delivery header data (Table LIKP) for specific deliveries, that I mentioned previously.
1. Give the control parameter a short name, I named mine IBD for example.
2. Configure the table extractor.
a. Set the IN statement within the Where clause. Leave a space between the parenthesis and control parameter on both sides. For Example. LIKP~VBELN IN ( IBD )
b. Select the fields for output like any other table extraction.
3. Configure the Action
a. This is the movie clacker. It should already say Update Value, but if not, set the action type to Update Value
b. Click on WhereClause in the Config window
c. At the bottom of that window click the replace a specific string checkbox, and make sure just your control parameter is named. In this example IBD
4. Configure the Workflow that uses the macro
In the workflow that is going to run this data you need to do the following steps. (You can bypass A & B if your data is already concatenated).
a. Create a summarize, Group By. to get your field alone.
b. Create a summarize, Concatenate (Start ' Separator ',' End ' ) to get your field in the correct input format.
c. Connect Macro to that dataflow.
Let's say I have Inbound Delivery #'s of 1234, 1255, and 1296, and any other information, when you hit the 2 summarizes, you're going to get unique Inbound delivery numbers, and then they're going to be concatenated into a single string with each value encased in single quotes with a comma between them. For example this would be my input into the macro for those 3 Inbound Deliveries '1234','1255','1296'
That's what gets passed into the macro, which looks at it's action and says okay, I need to replace the word IBD in the Where clause, with this concatenated string. So what was WHERE LIKP~VBEN IN ( IBD ) becomes WHERE LIKP~VBELN IN ( '1234','1255','1296' ). This is a valid Statement that can be used by Xtract table, and so you will get the results for just these 3 values. (As opposed to pulling the range and getting 60 results.)
Hope this helps!
