Drill links

Overview

The Portal is intended to be an inherently intuitive interface for viewing and navigating through analytical data. This form of reporting is often referred to as "Guided Analysis," because the designer has not only anticipated the most salient high-level analyses but has also anticipated the answers to the "next question." A good answer usually leads to another question; the Portal supports this by allowing the user to click an analysis and drill to more detailed, explanatory analyses.

Strictly speaking, drills do not modify metrics. Drills function as navigation links from one piece of data (the current metric) to other data the user may want to see.

For a drill path to be effective, not only must it answer the next question, but it should not require too many drills for the user to get to an answer. Typically, three or four steps —or clicks— are considered the maximum depth of a drill path.

Drill target

A drill is implemented as a parent-child relationship between a parent metric and another object, also known as the target object.

Examples of drill targets include:

• A Metric Details page.
• A Dashboard page.
• A Report object.
• A "drill-through" to an external analysis (a Business Objects report, for example). Drill-through links are defined separately from metrics, and a metric link object can be copied and changed to suit many metric instances. The drill-through can point to any target definable by a URL. User credentials may be passed to an external analysis server if this external analysis server is supported by the Portal.

Context-sensitive drills

When defining drills, you have the option to pass context from the parent to the target object/URL. Passing context means the filtering of the target analysis by the value selected in the parent analysis. For example, if the user clicks on Grade 03 in an analysis of Math Test Results, they will go to a Math Classroom Marks dashboard, which is filtered by Grade 03. Context can be passed not only to another dashboard or to a defined Report object, but also to the drill-through URL target.

Link types

When you add a link to a metric, there are three different link types available. Note that a metric link is not displayed if the user does not have proper access to the target object. However, external URL targets cannot be secured and are always shown.

• Drill Link: A shortcut to another Metric Details, Dashboard, Report object, or external URL that can be context-sensitive, and is activated when the user clicks somewhere on the metric's content. The user can use a left mouse click for the default drill link (first drill link in the list that is available to them) or, if there are multiple drill links, they can use the right mouse button to bring up a context menu and select an alternate drill link to use. Drill links can be defined to open their target content in the Content section, or in a browser tab.
• Action Link: A shortcut to another dashboard, Report object, or an external URL that is not context-sensitive, but it has drilling capabilities. This type of link can open its target in the Content section or in a new browser tab.
• Action Button: An action button is similar to the drill link, except that, when rendered, a column at the far left of the metric's data grid is added and all action buttons defined for this metric are arranged horizontally within the grid. This type of action is only rendered for those metrics that use an HTML table or a Dynamic Crosstab style template.