Drill down in XCelsius/Dashboard Design

One of the most frequent questions I get is around configuring drill down in XCelsius (Dashboard Design). XCelsius is primarily a dashboard development tool and it is not meant for analysis. Thus the typical usage of XCelsius does not require the standard type of adhoc drill down analysis that one would normally do within say web intelligence. However there are some instances where you would want a dashboard where the user can select some high level KPI and then have the ability to look into the details of that KPI. This can done using the drill down functionality in XCelsius. Keep in mind although it is called drill down the behaviour more consistent with master-detail type of report rather than a traditional drill down. The video below shows this in more detail.

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Drilldown functionality in XCelsius (a.k.a Dashboard Design)

 

So how can you build something like this. It is actually quite simple as you can see in the video below.

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How to enable drill down in a pie chart

 

Combining this with the live office functionality discussed in the last post should allow you to build really powerful and interactive dashboards. You can download a more complete example from here.

Drill down and Drill across in WEBI

While BusinessObjects provides a fairly simple way to drill down using hierarchies there are times where this is not good enough. For example if we take the Motors example, lets say when the user drills down from the showroom, they want to see a report that displays the demographic information and models for that particular showroom. This is usually hard to do just by using hierarchies and this is where hyperlink drill down is very useful.

But before we go to Hyperlink drill down (or as I call it drill across), let us quickly cover hierarchical drill down. The screenshot below shows 2 ways to define hierarchies in the universe.

The natural hierarchies which is automatically defined by the universe is based on the order or objects within a class. For example in my universe I have Year->Qtr->Month->Date as my time hierarchy. Now if I enable drill in my report I can drill down to specific dates as shown below.

I can also define a custom hierarchy as shown in the figure 1 where I have combined the showroom and the model into a single hierarchy such that when the user drill from the showroom they can see the models in the showroom.

Now coming to drill across. For example when I click on the revenue below I want to jump to another report that shows the sales by model in that country for the selected year as shown below.

Setting that up is fairly simple. I have to create 2 reports as shown below.

The 2nd report accepts the showroom country and year as prompts. Now I have to go to the summary report i.e. Showroom by year and setup the drill across. You can setup a hyperlink drill down by right click on the cell and selecting “New Hyperlink” as shown below.

When setting up the hyperlink you would need to associate the objects from the summary report to be sent as parameters to the prompts in the detailed report as shown above.