Creating a navigation/drill thru report

In my last post I talked about using the navigation capability in the reporting layer to create the illusion of Drilling down.

This is easily achieved by creating a report with all the elements you wish to see. (Kind of like a detailed view)
We were using "Loan ID" to click thru to this report.
To allow a user to prompt on "Loan ID", so that only the data relevant to that "Loan ID" is displayed, the "Loan ID" needs to be prompted.
This can be easily done in the filters section by setting the option to 'is prompted'
Now whenever a user click on a "Loan ID", the report will navigate to this detailed report and present the user with more detailed information about that "Loan ID"

So far we have gone through many iterations in our report development.
One of the changes made was that "Loan id" was renamed to "Loan ID". The fact that the case of the attribute name was different did not cause any of the pre-existing reports to fail. But it did not work when navigating using prompts. "Loan id", was not able to prompt "Loan ID".
If you are going through many changes and could miss something, my suggestion would be to always check the names & spelling of the attributes or they will not work as you imagine they should.

OBIEE Drill through/Drill down

Our users asked to be able to drill down from an element to other elements.

In this case -
They wanted to click on "Loan ID" and see some additional elements for that "Loan ID".

Our two options were to either create a hierarcy in the 'Administrator' tool or to create a navigation path between two reports.


We chose the second option - to enable Drill thru as a navigation option between the reports.
This was useful as the information available after the Drill was easier to customize. An advanced user could be trained to add or remove elements at this level.


To achieve this, go to the Criteria tab of the report and click on the Column properties























Select the tab for column Format and under value integration, set it to Navigate.
You will then see the options to add navigation target (You can add more than one target but make sure you enter a unique caption for each target).
For the first target, enter the path to the report you wish to navigate to ( I have assumed you have already created your detailed report and that "Loan ID" is set to prompted(next post).Enter a meaningful caption.

If you wish to add more targets, click on 'Add Navigation Target' and you follow the same instructions above.
Click OK once you are done and want these changes to be applied only to the current report.
If you want the changes to be applied to all the reports which would use this element, click on Save in the bottom left corner, and select "as system wide default for "Loan Attributes"."Loan ID".
You can always go to other reports and turn this option off by setting the value interaction to - 'No Interaction'

Once done save this report and preview it.
You will see that when you hover over a Loan ID, the mouse pointer will turn into a hand and be clickable like a hyperlink.
If you have more than one navigation target, you will be given all the options as a sort of drop down menu when you click the Loan ID.

OBIEE Tips

This blog contains some of the different issues I have run into during my implementations of OBIEE and OBIApps.
Feel free to leave your comments and/or tips.

Thanks,
Anisha