Cognos Drill Through-How to create parent & Child reports and Drill through

Drill Through is one of the most important features in cognos Reporting tool. It allows you to drill down or drill up from one report to another report or from one report to another query or a query to another report or any multi dimensional analysis to a report.

It is the basic mechanism of traversing from one analysis to other. In simple it is just like a website where you drill down or up from one plae to other. If you go to any site like facebook or orkut or youtube, you drill from one webpage to other. In the same way you can find the same thing in statistics based sorts websites like wimbledon.org or Cricinfo.com



Coming to the Reporting world, cognos use the same feature just like those mentioned in above examples. Now, lets see how can we create a drill through report?

Steps to create a drill through between reports:

1. Here we have taken the Go sales and Retailers package. you can go to my previous post to know how to select or change the report package

2. Now, create a list report by dragging and dropping Product line, Product Type, Product Name from Product Folder of GO Sales and Retailers Package. you can go to my previous post on how to create a list report if you have any doubts.

3. Save the report as parent. This report is served as our parent Report.

4. Now create a new report using same package. Create List and add Product Type,Margin from Product Folder of Go Sales and Retailers Package.

5. After creating list, go to the query explorer and click on Query1.

6. Now, drag and drop a filter from the insertable objects pane.

7. In the pop window for filter definition add condition as shown [gosales_goretailers].[Products].[Product type] = ?[Product type]?. Here the data item we want to drill upon should be used. If you want to drill upon product line or country or any other data item you can give it like this.

Note: This filter condition should be customized depending upon your needs. You can give ?param_xyz? instead of ?[Product type]? if you want to pass some values in run time to the parameter parm_xyz.

8. Save the report as child. This report is going to be used as child in this example.

9. Now open the parent report. In List,right click the product type column and give Drill Through Definitions.

10. Add new Drill through definition. Give report name as child (the report which you want to drill through)

11. Now edit the parameter,give the parameter name you created in child. In this case [Product type]

12. You can view a blue colored (unless you have cutomized cognos colord too) fields in the list as shown.

13. Running the report will result you in a report like this. click on any of product types ,you can drill through to child report. You will be migrated to the new child report.