Drill-through Access

Drill-through access helps you to build business intelligence applications that are bigger than a single report. Drill-through applications are a network of linked reports that users can navigate, retaining their context and focus, to explore and analyze information.

Using drill-through access, you can move from one report to another within a session while maintaining your focus on the same piece of data. For example, you select a product in a sales report and move to an inventory report about that product.

Drill-through access works by defining the target report using prompts, and then using information from the source report to provide answers to those prompts. An important part of defining a drill-through path is defining which values to use for each prompt. If a prompt is answered by the drill-through value passed to it, the prompt page does not appear.

In Cognos 8, you can drill through

• between reports created in different packages against different data source types

  For example, you can drill through from an analysis against a cube to a detailed report against a relational data source.

• from one existing report to another report using Report Studio

• between Cognos Viewer reports authored in Report Studio, Query Studio, and Analysis Studio reports

• from Series 7 PowerPlay Web cubes to Cognos 8 reports

• from Metric Studio to other Cognos 8 reports by passing parameters using URLs.

  For more information, see the Metric Studio User Guide.