Most of data manipulation techniques of the Desktop application can be used in the mobile app also; like ordering rows or going deeper in detail.
We will use the reports named 17 Internet Sales by Category, Country and Year and 18 Dynamic Aggregation by Country and Product. You need to have completed them to continue.
Open the mobile app and scroll the report list to find the number 17: this one has a page-by element:
- Tap the report and run it, you will see the result page and a new bar with a button selector. In this case, the
Yearattribute is the page-by element. - Tap in the center of the grid and swipe, you will see an indicator showing the present year and the next (or previous) flashing for a brief moment. When the indicator fades away, the grid shows the results for another year.
- Repeat the swipe to move back or forth in the page elements (depending on the sort order, the past years are to the right or to the left).
- Another way to flip pages is to tap-and-hold the button in the page-by bar. Depending on the length of the attribute label and the size of the finger, this second option may be tricky, see the following screen capture. I've seen people doing this with a Bratwurst…:
- In the drop-down list that opens, tap the year you want to switch to.
- Now close this report and run the number 18.
- When the grid appears, tap-and-hold the Bikes element, when you release, a new context menu pops up with the option to drill. Tap the menu to see the drill interface. Use the swipe movement on the drill path selector to highlight the direction where you want to go, for example, Product Subcategory.
- When the Product Subcategory is highlighted, tap it and tap again Update.
- See that the grid is now filtered on the Bikes category and displays the subcategory on the rows.
- Look for Germany in the first group (Mountain Bikes). Tap-and-hold, then release and select Drill. Drill to City: now you see the list of cities in Germany where we sold mountain bikes. Wunderbar!
- Now we want to sort the cities by name. Tap-and-hold the City column header (not the city name) and release so that the context menu appears. Select Sort and then Ascending.
- The cities are now sorted by name.
When the user navigates to a different attribute (from country to city) the request is sent to the Mobile Server and the result is retrieved, while in the case of sorting the operation is performed on the app. Care must be taken when drilling to a completely different path as the request may be very complex. It's the developer's responsibility to prepare easy-to-explore reports and predefined exploration routes with the use of, for example, document links.
On the title bar, there is a small graph button, tap this to quickly switch the view from grid to graph. Try it with report number 17 to see how easy it is to change from a table view to a chart.
The other button on the title bar, a curved arrow, is the action button. If you tap it and select Email Screen, you can share the current view of the report by e-mail.