DefinedElements

Categorical value, used only to specify which MDM object to use.

Optional. Flags specifying which types of Element objects to include. The default is (Category + Base).

The possible values for Types are shown in the following table.

Value	Description
1	Category elements
2	Base elements
4	Subtotal elements
8	Summary data elements
16	Derived elements
32	Subheading elements

The flags may be used in any combination, to select elements of more than one type. For example, to select all Category and Base elements, use 1 + 2 = 3.

Val may refer to any type of MDM object that has elements, for example, Field, Array, Grid or VariableInstance, or it may be an Elements list itself.

If the current value is NULL, Val is an empty Categorical value ({}) and the return value is also an empty Categorical value.

This function requires the case data to be opened with an MDM document or for a script to have an open MDM document available to it. Otherwise, an error will occur. For more information about opening a MDM document in a script, see Value resolution.

Like DefinedCategories, DefinedElements is typically used to define groups in SQL queries. However, whereas DefinedCategories defines groups based on categories only, you can use DefinedElements to define groups based on any element type that stores case data or a combination of these element types.

The following query creates groups based on all categories and any base elements in the gender and gender.Ex variables in the Museum Quanvert sample data base. The gender.Ex variable is included in the GROUP BY statement because Quanvert DSC stores special elements in a separate variable that has an .Ex suffix.

For more information, see Quanvert DSC.

SELECT groupby.col[0] AS Gender,
SUM(visits) AS 'Sum of visits'
FROM vdata
WHERE visits > 0
GROUP BY gender.EX + gender
ON gender.Ex.Definedelements() + gender.Definedelements()

Here is the result set:

Gender     Sum of visits
{base}     2131
{male}     1309
{female}   822

For additional SQL query information, see Advanced SQL queries.