What is a drilldown?
A drilldown is defined as an action on an object, such as a bar in a bar chart or a cell in a table. When the object is clicked, another report opens or the same report with adjusted parameters. The parameter values are taken from the clicked context and passed to the target project.
A typical scenario: In an annual sales report, the user clicks on the year 2023 and then sees a breakdown of the monthly sales of that year. This also works with tables – for example, by displaying a customer’s individual receipts when clicking on the customer’s name.
More background on interactive reports and drilldowns in the desktop designer can be found in our blog post.
What needs to be considered?
To use drilldowns in the Web Report Designer, the projects must be stored in the repository. Only repository-based projects support the parameterization and referencing required for drilldowns.
Drilldowns can be defined in two ways:
- Using report parameters: Clicked values are passed to the target template and evaluated as parameters there.
- Using relations in the data source: If the data source contains appropriate 1:n or 1:1 relationships, List & Label automatically recognizes them and allows drilldowns along these data hierarchies.
The drilldown targets can be either separate projects or variants of the same project with different filter values.
In the web preview, you can identify interactive areas by a change in the cursor and seamlessly navigate between reports.
Important difference from the desktop version
In contrast to the desktop designer, the Web Report Designer does not support direct file references or absolute paths to project files. Instead, references must be made within the same repository.
With the drilldown feature in the Web Report Designer, interactive analysis paths can be implemented directly in the browser – without any additional development work. This brings the web version functionally even closer to the desktop designer and expands the possibilities for complex web reporting scenarios.
Benjamin works as a full stack developer at combit. In addition to being a part of the dev team, he is also involved in vocational training. In his free time, he engages for the volunteer fire department.
