Drilling

"Drilling" is a way of navigating hierarchical data in a BI application. In a report it is very similar to a link, with additional data or context being passed along. Birst provides many types of drilling:

Drill Down: A predefined hierarchy displays information at a more detailed level (default mode). Any pre-set drill down columns are determined by a hierarchy defined in the dimensional model of the space by a Space Administrator. If no hierarchies are defined, you can manually specify the drill down columns.

Example: Drilling enables the viewer of a report to click on a data value (usually formatted in underline text to indicate it can be drilled) to view a greater level of detail. For example, a business user could click on a year in a report to view data for each quarter of the year, and click on the quarter to see data for each month in the quarter. This is an example of hierarchical drilling.

Drill to Dashboard from a Column: Navigates to an existing dashboard passing additional data from the drill. When the user clicks on a value, the value is passed to the dashboard page identified to drill to.

Example: When the user clicks on a product category (e.g., Produce) in a report in a dashboard, drilling can take the user to a dashboard page where the data is filtered for Produce (the selected product category). Using additional drill parameters, you could also add year to pass the year for the row of the category that was clicked on, so the user sees the data filtered for the category and year in the dashboard.

Drill to Dashboard from a Button: You can drill to a dashboard from a button in a report.

Example: Using conditional display rules and a hidden prompt, you can configure buttons to change the information displayed in a pie chart on a dashboard page depending on which button the user presses. In this example a dashboard user is presented with two options for viewing sales data. Clicking one button display Sales by Category and clicking the other displays Sales by Customer in the pie chart.

Drill to Dashboard from an Image: You can also drill to a dashboard from an image in a report.

Drill to a Web Site using a Hyperlink: You can configure a report element such as a label, column, image or chart with a hyperlink so that when the user clicks on the element, the user navigates to an internal or external web site.

Creating Dashboards with Drilling Capabilities

Original Dashboards

Drill Down:

Configure the column for drilling.
Specify the drill path if it is not already defined in the data.

Drill to Dashboard:

Create a target dashboard.
Configure a column, button or image in a report to drill to the target dashboard.
Add the report to a dashlet in the target dashboard.
See Setting Up Dashboard Filter Prompts.
See Changing Dashlet Properties.

Drill to Web Site:

Add a hyperlink to the report element, such as a label, column, image, or chart, in Designer.

Dashboards 2.0

See Creating Dashboards 2.0.