Drill maps provide users with the capability of viewing data that is not available on the report. It allows analyzing the data within the same or a different context of data on the report. Let's say report 1 is created to view the annual sales of a company, but then the user wants to view the quarterly sales of the company; this can be achieved by drilling.
The user can drill on any object by right-clicking or double-clicking via the developer, or by a single click via the Web, and selecting the direction of the drill. If the user right-clicks on an element, it will drill for that particular element only, whereas if the user selects the header, it will drill for all the elements on that column. If user hierarchies are not defined, then system hierarchies create a default drill map. The drill path includes the destination of the drill, which could be an attribute, a hierarchy, or a template.
Creating drill maps and paths
You can open the drill map editor in various ways, as follows:
- From Project: Select File | New | Drill map
- From Report: Select Data menu | Edit drill map
- From Attributes: Select Tools | Edit drill map
- From Consolidation: Select Tools | Edit drill map
- From Custom group: Select Custom group | Edit drill map
Selecting any of the preceding options opens a drill map editor, as follows:
Enter the values of the different components of a drill map editor. The components are:
- Origin: This displays the object for which we want to create a drill map or the objects that are present in a report. Origin can either be empty or have values, depending on the method of our drill map creation.
- Object browser: Displays the objects of the project in hierarchical order. We can drag and drop the objects from here to any of the drill paths or to the origin section.
- Drill map section: This section has following components:
- Name: This is the name of the drill map; upon selecting any object, the drill map name changes to
ProjectDrillMap - Browse: Allows the user to edit the existing drill map
- Remove association: Allows the user to disassociate the object from the current drill map
- Name: This is the name of the drill map; upon selecting any object, the drill map name changes to
- Drill Paths: Here the user defines the destination to be drilled. This section contains the following drill paths:
- Up: Allows a user to select an object, which could be an attribute, custom group, or consolidation. The object selected will be shown under the drill up menu on the report.
- Down: The object selected will be shown under the drill down menu on the report.
- Across: The object selected will be shown under the drill other directions menu on the report.
- Template: This is where objects are displayed in a report. It allows the user to replace the report template with the destination template.
- Properties: This section contains the following components:
- Drill path display name: Name displayed on the right; click while drilling on the report.
- Drill path description: Description of drill path, with a limit of 250 characters.
Let's look at a drilling example:
We create a report showing Internet sales by region. We can drill down from the country level to see the sales in the states that make up the country and drill up from products. The relationship between attributes defines how we can drill between them. The drill map editor and report based on our example are as follows.
The Drill map editor is as follows:
A report based on the drill map is as follows:
