Drill Through to Another Target

You can navigate from a report to a target.

Targets can include a Query Studio report, a Report Studio report, an Analysis Studio analysis, a PowerPlay® Studio report, a package that contains a PowerCube, or a Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) action.

You can also navigate from a report or analysis authored in one package to more detailed information in a report which was authored in another package. For example, this is useful when you want to drill from a summarized OLAP source, such as your sales information, into the detailed relational or transactional information, such as your inventory volumes.

Drilling through from one report to another is a method of passing information from the source (your starting report) to the target (your ending report). For example, you may be evaluating a report and discover something you need to investigate in a certain product line. You can drill through to the detailed target report which provides a focused view of that product line. When drilling through to the target, the product line you selected in the source is passed and the target report is run with that filter, making a more focused report.

By default, the ability to drill through from one report to another is enabled. You can disable it by using the Enable selection-based interactivity option. For more information, see Disable Selection-based Interactivity.

For information about drill-through concepts and setting up drill-through access, see Drill-through Access.

Before you can navigate to another target, a drill-through definition must be created in either the Report Studio source report or in IBM Cognos Connection.

To run reports, or drill to targets that run reports in the delimited text (CSV), PDF, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (XLS), or XML output formats, you require the generate output capability for the specific format. For more information, see Report formats.

Procedure

  1. Run the report in IBM Cognos Connection and view it in IBM Cognos Viewer.
    Tip: Alternatively, you can open an Analysis Studio report or Query Studio report in their respective studios.
  2. Right-click the report item from which you want to navigate and click Go To Go to icon, Related Links. The Go To page appears, showing the available targets.
    Note: If there is only one possible target for the column, the reports runs and appears in IBM Cognos Viewer.
  3. Click the target you want to navigate to.

Results

Depending on how the drill-through definition was set up and the report type, the target opens in either IBM Cognos Viewer, Query Studio, PowerPlay Studio, or Analysis Studio.