Drilldown via Report Parameters

Building on the sound foundation of report parameters introduced in version 19 of our List & Label reporting tool, we've extended the way drilldown reports can be used in the report designer.
In addition to the drilldown via relations which we already had in the product for a couple of versions, you can now trigger a sub report that uses report parameters and set the parameter values depending on the item that you just clicked in the preview. This terrific feature works for pie/donut and bar charts, shapefile charts, table fields and crosstab contents. Of course, a drilldown report can contain another drilldown, too.
As with all the feature focus articles, keep in mind that this feature is not yet available in the current version, it will be part of List & Label 20.

Walkthrough

An easy yet powerful example: let’s take the following chart that shows the revenue data distribution over the different categories. Now wouldn’t it be nice to click on one of the bars and get the data that makes up the bar? Well, the new drilldown mode lets you do just that.

example table for drilldown reporting parameters

From the chart dialog, edit the (newly added) drilldown links property and create a new drilldown report. Add a report parameter @Category (just a simple text parameter), create the revenue report as required and make sure to set the Category table’s filter to “Categories.CategoryName = @Category” in order to filter the data to the value of the report parameter.

creating a drilldown parameter

Once you return to the drilldown link editor, you may now set the value of the @Category parameter. In this case, the CategoryName from the 1:1 linked category table is the value we need.

dialog drilldown links

Once this report is run, you can now move the mouse over the bars of the chart. A hover effect indicates an active drilldown link. If you click one of the bars, the drilldown report will be triggered, the report parameter will be set to the category name you just clicked on and the data will be filtered accordingly to show the data you’ve just selected.

new table with drilldown parameter

drilldown data in new table

Neat, isn’t it?

Oh well, but wait a minute – filtering in the report, isn’t that somewhat slow? The surprising answer to this will be part of the next feature focus

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