Understanding Drill-through Concepts |
Before you set up drill-through access, you must understand the key concepts about drilling through. Knowing these concepts will help you to avoid errors so that report consumers drill through as efficiently as possible.
Report-based drill-through refers to a drill-through path created and contained in a Report Studio Report. The drill-through path is associated with a specific data column, chart, or cross tab, and is available only when users select that area of the report. The drill-through definition, if it exists, appears as a hyperlink in the source report. Usually this area of the report shows the data to be passed as a parameter. However, other values can be passed as well, or instead.
The report-based drill-through is limited to Report Studio source reports and any target reports. This type of drill-through can be used when you want to pass the parameter results within a source report to the target report, the results of a report expression to a target report, or a URL link as a part of the drill-through.
When users follow a drill-through path, they usually run the report filtered by the drill-through parameters. They then see the results in Report Viewer as an HTML Web page. However, there are other options.
Reports can be output as HTML Web pages, or as PDF, XML, CSV, or Excel formats. When you define a drill-through path, you can choose the output format. This can be useful if the expected use of the target report is something other than online viewing. If the report will be printed, output it as PDF; if it will be exported to Excel for further processing, output it as Excel or CSV, and so on.
If you define a drill-through path to a report that is created in Query Studio, the report can be run and opened in Query Studio instead of in Report Viewer. This can be useful if you expect a consumer to use the drill-through target report as the start of an analysis or query session to find more information. Drilling through to Query Studio is not supported, because Query Studio does not show any data.
When you drill through, the values that you pass are usually, but not always, used to filter the report using prompts. PPM Reporting supports bookmarks within PDF reports so that a user can scroll a report to view the relevant part based on a URL parameter. For example, you may define a report with one page per product and add a bookmark of the product number on each page. Report consumers can then select a bookmark to see the product that they want.
When a bookmark in the source report is used in a drill-through definition, it provides the value for the URL parameter. When report consumers drill through using this definition, they see the relevant section of the target report.
Bookmark references are limited to previously run reports that are output as PDF and contain bookmark objects.
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