Question - any way to set a Page Item in a worksheet to default to All ?

Question

Well, I seem to have run across an interesting situation here. I have a table worksheet with page items. I have noticed one thing while testing this new worksheet/workbook. If I pick a value for one of the page items (and with page items, it seems I can only pick one value at a time) and then save the worksheet, close the workbook, and then reopen the workbook and run the worksheet, Discoverer has retained the page item value as the value when I saved it, rather than defaulting back to <All>. So I quickly learned a new lesson with this darn Discoverer product - make sure all page items set to the <All> value before I save a worksheet that I am going to want to promote to Production.
Well, now I have run into a situation where based on the conditions I have to set in the workbook, I have a Page Item in the worksheet that today has only 1 value that pulls into the worksheet. When I do the drop down on that Page Item, it only shows the one value. It does not give me the ability to pick the <All> option. So I am unable to save the workbook with the <All> value today for that page item. There are other potential values for this Page Item that could show up in the future.
Now granted if this were to happen, the Viewer user could do the drop down on the page item at that time and pick the <All> value at that time. But alas, since they are not the owner of the workbook, they could only save as a new workbook, with themselves as the owner - cannot change the production workbook so it would be changed going forward. This also means the user has to realize that they are missing data and that the fixed page item value is the cause of that, which I am skeptical that they will be able to figure out. So I really want this page item value to default to <All> when the users open and run this worksheet.
So here is my question - does anyone know of a way to set the Page Item value to be <All> automatically when a worksheet is run?
I hope this makes some sense. Always a challenge to explain an issue well. It took me a bit to realize that when saving a worksheet/workbook, it was retaining the selected page item values when I performed the save. It is also very unusual to have a situation where a page item does not currently have multiple values. So this may be a situation that few people have run across.
John Dickey

Answer 1

Ah, there is a potential workaround, as I have finally figured out. The workaround does require that you have the ability to bring in multiple values for the page item from the worksheet run result set. If you have a situation, like I have, where today you only have one valid value, you will still have a problem.
The workaround is this. Figure out a way to get multiple values into the worksheet run result set. That way when you do the page item drop down list, you will see the <All> value in that list. Pick that value, refresh the worksheet, and save the workbook. Now reset your worksheet back to your desired conditions, where you end up with just one value in the worksheet result set, and refresh the worksheet. The <All> is still retained as the page item default and when you do the drop down list for the page item, you see two values in the list - your 1 valid value plus the <All> value. So once you get that <All> set as the page item default, then it will be retained. This explains how support originally tested (on an existing worksheet) and said they were able to see and pick the <All> value.
Since it should be rare for something to have just one valid value in a worksheet result set, and even rarer to have just one current valid value in Oracle, this workaround should take care of most of the situations where you might encounter this issue. I still will push for an enhancement request to have that <All> value show in the drop down list even when just one value in the worksheet result set.
John Dickey