Drilling is the action to discover the data along an hierarchy (ie through the different levels). In OBIEE, drilling is one way to navigate or interact within the data.
OBIEE allows two types of drilling:
When you define the hierarchy of a dimension in the BI Server, you will have a standard drill down functionality in the form of a web-link.
You can drill down from:
Drilling on a
Example : If in a report, you have the Cust City column from the city level, you will have then a link attached which permit you to add the columns :
To have this behaviour, you have to configure your dimension as the picture below.
The level key to display is set by selecting the Use for drill down check box on the Level Key dialog box.
The yellow key is a drill down key to choose the columns that you want to add when you drill.
The green key is the unique key of the level, is set as primary key to be used in order to calculate the Number of Elements for the level.
On Hierarchical columns, just expand the members. Expanding and collapsing does not change the selection of data for the column.
Drill Through is referred in the Student Guide as “Setting the Preferred Drill Path”. Preferred Drill Path is most commonly used to drill from one dimension to another.
When you use more than an attribute column of a hierarchy in an expression then OBI will drill in the lowest level.
For instance, with the below expression, even if you have defined a quarter level between the year and month level, you will drill down in the month level.
CASE '@{TimeLevel}{Year}'
WHEN 'Year' then "Date Dimension"."Year"
ELSE "Date Dimension"."Month"
END
because the month level is the lowest level of the expression.