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13.5 Drill Settings for Designers

Besides actions, users interact with workbooks by drilling and by filtering from charts. Most of this works without any setup – see 6.2 Drilling Down and Drilling Through and 6.3 Filtering from the Data. This topic covers what designers can control.

Where Drill-Down Goes

When a user double-clicks a dimension member, Datashop drills to the next level. The path is decided by:

  1. a Drill hierarchy set on the column in the workbook, if any;
  2. otherwise the unit's Drill type in the data model (Modeller): Drill To Child Unit, Drill To Custom Dim Unit, Always Prompt or No Drill Down – see 23.1 Dimensions and Units.

To set a drill hierarchy for one column: double-click the dimension in the Element Structure panel, and on the Definition tab choose the Drill hierarchy. The clear button next to it goes back to the data model's setting.

Example: the data model drills from Customer to Invoice, but in a sales cockpit you want Customer → Item group → Item. Choose a hierarchy with those levels.

Users can always hold Shift while double-clicking to choose the level themselves.

Drill-Through

Drill-through on a number shows the records behind it, or the parts of a calculated metric. Designers don't need to set anything up.

The Drill-through tab in a metric's advanced settings defines a layout for metrics from external sources such as Google Analytics, which can't show their source records. For ordinary metrics it isn't used.

Charts as Filters

Users can make a chart filter the whole workbook: right-click a bar, point or slice → Use selected as filter, or Ctrl+click it. To pass such selections on to other workbooks, tick the chart under Graph as filter on the ACTION tab – see 13.3 Opening Workbooks and Passing Filters.

Click, Double-Click and Ctrl+Click

In normal view Table Chart
Click Runs the action, if any; on metric titles: sorts Runs the action, if any
Double-click Drills down (dimension) or through (number) Drills down
Ctrl+click – Use as filter