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Drill Down Reporting - Auto Drill Down Feature

When designing logical models/queries, you can associate their attributes/ columns with one or more reports or web pages. When these models or queries are used within a report or a viewsheet, hyperlinks are automatically created for drilling down to the associated reports or web pages. This is known as auto drill down.

It is also possible to pass parameters with the drill down hyperlinks. The parameter values could be the actual values of the attribute/column to which the auto-drill is attached, or a mapped value obtained from a query.

The main advantages of using auto drill down at the model or query level are that the drilldowns can incorporate the results of queries, and that the drill downs are automatically propagated to all dependent reports and viewsheets.

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Adding Auto-Drilldown to a Logical Model

The following examples illustrate how to pass parameters to a target report or web page by adding an auto-drilldown to a logical model. There are two basic kinds of parameter values that you can pass in an auto-drilldown:

• You can pass actual column data values, i.e., the hyperlinked values that are clicked by the end user.

• You can pass values derived from a query based on the column data.

Example 1: Passing column values in a drilldown. In this example you will add an auto-drilldown to the “Order Model” to provide drilldown hyperlinks from the ‘Customer’ > ‘Company’ attribute to the ‘OrderList’ report (in classes/ inetsoft/demos). The ‘OrderList’ report is designed to accept five parameters, one of those being ‘customer,’ which represents the company name of the customer.

When the user views this report in the Report Portal, they will see hyperlinks on all the names in the ‘Company’ column. These are the links added by the auto-drilldown.

This example illustrated how to pass column values in an auto-drilldown lto a report. It is also possible to pass query-based parameters to a report. The procedure is the same as passing query-basedparameters to a web page, which is described in the Example 2: Passing query-based values in drilldown.

Example 2: Passing query-based values in drill. The example above illustrated how to add an auto-drill to pass actual column values as parameters to a report. Sometimes, you do not want to transmit the column values themselves, but rather some information that is related to the column values. To do this, you can add a query-based auto-drilldown to the logical model.

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Passing Multiple Parameters in Query-based Auto Drill-Downs

The previous examples described how to use auto-drilldowns to pass a single parameter to a specified report or web page. It is also possible to pass multiple parameters in an auto-drill.

The procedure for creating multiple-parameter drill-downs is the same as described in the previous section. If the query specified in Steps 1–8 of the second example above returns more than one column, all of the returned columns will be available for selection in the ‘Value’ pane of the ‘Auto Drill’ page.

For example, if you design a query called ‘getProductInfo’ that returns the three columns ‘product_id’, ‘company,’ and ‘city,’ when you specify the ‘getProductInfo’ query in the ‘Auto Drill-Down’ window, these three columns will be shown in the ‘Value’ pane. Each of the multiple attributes listed in the ‘Value’ panel can then be selected and mapped to a parameter name.

As in the previous examples, if the auto-drill is targeting a report, the parameter names specified in the ‘Auto Drill’ window must be identical to the corresponding parameter names specified in the report. If the auto-drill is targeting a web page, the parameter names specified in the ‘Auto Drill’ window will be the names used in the hyperlink URL, with parameter-value pairs separated by the ampersand (&) symbol.

Adding Auto Drill-down to a Query

Adding auto drill-down at the query level is very similar to adding auto drill-down at the model level. (See Example 1: Passing column values in a drill-down and Example 2: Passing query-based values in drill-down above.) Auto drill-downs can be added to new queries or existing queries.

Query-Based Parameters

Note that the ‘Auto Drill Down’ window for query-level auto drill down also offers the option of passing query-based parameters. See Example 2: Passing query-based values in drill downs for details of the procedure. Specifying a query in the ‘Auto Drill Down’ window, as you did in Step 9 of the example, is the same for auto drill downs on queries as for auto drill downs on models; the value of the column clicked by the end-user provides the input to the query specified in the ‘Auto Drill Down’ window, which then generates as output the parameters to be passed in the auto drill down.