filtering with Incidents.i_id versus incidents.ref_no

Content

I have a few reports that run without problems when I filter by the incidents.i_id field, but not when I use the incidents.ref_no field.

Is there a way to add the ref_no when adding the filter, but then in the back-end convert the ref_no to the i_id and filter by the i_id instead?

It seems that the Rule Log report runs this way. But, since it is an internal report, I am not able to see how the report does the conversion.

Has anyone figured this out?

Version

Service Cloud November 2016 SP3