Tutorial 7 - Creating drill-down reports

1. Drill-down on the CustomerList (customer ID)

In this Tutorial, we will create a drill-down report sequence. We will sensitize some of the fields of the CustomerList report to trigger the execution of another report when these sensitized fields are clicked on.

Specifically, when the user clicks on the Customer ID, we want to run another report: Customers. This way the user can view the purchasing history of the selected customer.

Let us revisit the CustomerList report, namely its Print component Inspector. Select Customers.CustomerID field, and click on the "Drill down" tab. The view in this tab provides control over the report(s) that can be executed by clicking on this field. Press Add button, and select Customers report:

When the Customers report is added to the drill-down Inspector tab view, its parameters (actually, just one parameter) is shown in the bottom box. The value of the report parameter can be hard-coded (i.e. set once and for all), or it can be set dynamically as the CustomerList report runs. It is this latter option that we want to use: every time the CustomerID field is printed in the CustomerList report, its value is captured and saved for the drill-down Customers report, so that when the user clicks on the field, its associated Customer ID will be passed to the Customers report for execution.

This is what the Inspector shows as we go through the process described in the previous paragraph:

If we run the CustomerList report now, the CustomerID fields will be shown in a blue color, and they will be mouse-sensitive:

2. Drill-down on the Customer (order number)

Now we add a similar feature to the Customer report, by sensitizing its Order ID field for a drill-down. The report to be triggered in this drill-down sequence is Order, and the drill-down is wired up as in the figure below:

We could run this report stand-alone, invoking it from the Saved Reports window as in Tutorial 4, but it is more interesting to run it as a second-order drill-down report by clicking on one of the Customer ID fields in CustomerList report, essentially continuing the sequence that started in the previous section:

We now have a cascading sequence of drill-down reports, that can be traversed by the user working with Scribe client, or with the Web browser; in the latter case Scribe generates HTML- or PDF-based reports with mouse-sensitive areas that transmit the clicks to the Scribe Web Server and replicate the drill-down behavior at the browser level.