In this section, we are going to show you how to do perhaps the most important thing in Yurbi. Connect your summarized reports to your detailed reports, we call it drill-down.
The way Yurbi approaches drill-down reporting is one of the key differentiators among other BI tools. Many BI tools simply build an in-memory representation of a single query from the database and when you drill-down, all you are doing is looking at the data from that single query, across another dimension or view-point.
Benefits of Yurbi Drill-Downs
In Yurbi, we leverage a parent-target approach to drill-down. That means that you can establish drill down actions not just between 1 database, but between multiple databases, and not just between one view of the data, but whatever view you wish.
The other key value of Yurbi’s approach, any criteria or filters that you have applied at the parent report (via dashboard filters for example) are also applied to the target report (assuming the same fields exist). So as a report builder, you don’t have to worry about coding that functionality, it’s done for you by Yurbi.
And another benefit, in addition to drilling down into another Yurbi report, you can also drill-out. You can establish a click action on any field to launch to an external webpage while passing parameters of data dynamically. So for example, you could have a ticket number that launches a user into a help desk system to that exact ticket. Or you can have a link that says “edit me” and pass all the data into a web form with information pre-filled so that users can take action.
While up to this point and in this section we are demonstrating how to establish a drill down from a summarized report to a datagrid, you can drill down to any Yurbi output type. So the power of the feature is multi-level drill down. Start at a KPI, drill down to a trend history chart, then to either another visualization or a datagrid showing all the data to allow grid-style slicing and dicing.
There are 4 types of ways to set up a drill-down in Yurbi but don’t worry, you don’t have to decide between them, the type of drill-down is simply determined by the type of report or visualization you are creating.
4 Types of Drill-Down In Yurbi
- drill down from within a datagrid
- drill down from within a basic pivot grid
- drill down from a Treemap visualization
- drill down from an Advanced Pivot Grid
They are all useful, but the most important in our opinion is the drill down from within a datagrid. As discussed, the datagrid is the foundation of all summary reports as well as the majority of data visualizations.
Few key factors to remember about drill-downs
- create your target reports first, you will need to reference them when you set up the drill-down relationship
- make sure your target report has the field in it that you want users to click to drill-down from the parent report (ie, if you’re clicking on ticket number in the parent, make sure ticket number is in the target)
- anything you want to pass as a filter must also be in the target report (you can add them as hidden fields if needed)
- you can’t drill down from a number to a number, drill down fields must be character-based
In this video, we cover all the methods and show you the differences in setting them up.