Drilling in Views

In Which Columns Can I Drill?

You can drill in attribute columns and hierarchical columns. For information on drilling in columns, see "Drilling in Results."

How Do I Allow Drilling in Columns?

As the content designer, you specify whether users can drill in particular columns in views on dashboards. You control whether drilling is allowed in particular columns by specifying options in the "Column Properties dialog: Interaction tab."

A primary interaction governs what you can do against a column, for example, drill, send master-detail, and so on. If drilling is not set as the primary interaction of a particular column (that is, Drill has not been specified as the value for the Column Heading: Primary Interaction or Value: Primary Interaction box in the "Column Properties dialog: Interaction tab"), then you can allow drilling as a right-click interaction in table and pivot table views at runtime. To do so, you select the Drill (when not a primary interaction) option in the "Analysis Properties dialog: Interactions tab."

What are the Effects of Drilling on Filters and Selection Steps?

Drilling in columns affects their filters and selection steps as described in the following list. For more information, see Chapter 5, "Filtering and Selecting Data for Analyses."

• Hierarchical columns: No steps are added to the selection when you expand or collapse members in a hierarchical column. That is, the expanding and collapsing does not change the selection of data for the column.

  For example, suppose that you create a pivot table in which you select 2008 as the only member in the Time dimension, and you arrange the data so that this one Time member is the column header in the pivot table. You can expand to show quarters in 2008 and then the months in the last quarter. At this point the pivot table has child members for 2008, Q1 2008, Q2 2008, Q3 2008, Q4 2008, October 2008, November 2008, and December 2008. If you display the Selection Steps pane, however, you see that the selection for the Time dimension still contains only the 2008 member.

  Expanding and collapsing in a hierarchical column affects only that particular view. No other views are affected.

• Attribute columns: You can drill down from the row heading or column heading or from a member in an attribute column. Drilling on a heading adds the lower level to the view. Drilling on a member adds the lower level and affects both filters and selection steps:

  • Drilling on a member adds a filter for the current member, thereby limiting the results. For example, if you drill on the Game Station member in a table that includes the P1 Product column, you add the E1 Sales Rep Name column, which adds a filter that specifies that P1 Product equals Game Station.

  • Drilling on a member adds the lower-level column to the analysis and updates the column in the Selection Steps pane without providing a step update during design.

Related Topics

See the following topics that are related to drilling:

• For information on drilling in maps, see "Drilling in Map Views."

• For information on configuring for drilling in views in dashboards, see "Adding Content to Dashboards."

• For information on configuring hierarchical columns for drilling, see Metadata Repository Builder's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.