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.