PowerPlay Drill-Through - Using Measures

Cognos PowerPlay Web cubes can drill-through to Web Reports created in Report Studio. One of the challenges encountered is creating drill-throughs when a cube contains several measures. If you select a particular measure and want to drill-through to a report containing detailed records, you might get more records than you needed. The key here is creating several reports that are identical with the exception being the filter used for the measure that's of interest.

First, let's go over how to create/define a drill-through from PowerPlay.

1. In Transformer, go to the Measures box. For each measure that needs to have a drill-through, select that measure and then go to the Drill Through tab.
2. Add a file name for that measure . . example C:\Headcount.crr. Click OK.
3. Go to the next measure (if you need to) and do the same things. That is, go to the Drill Through tab and add another file name.
   
4. Save the Transform file.
   
5. Build a cube as you normally do.
6. Copy the cube to he Web Server.
7. In Report Studio on the web, create a report with the same name as the one created in the Drill Through tab for a particular measure. So if you created a file called Headcount.crr then create a web report called Headcount. Create an appropriate filter based on the measure . . . eg if there is a measure called head_count then set head_count = 1.
8. Save the web report and make a copy of it.
9. For each other report, change the filter required for that particular measure. The idea is the reports should be identical with the exception being the measure that is being filtered.

When you go to the PowerPlay cube and decide to drill-through, it will select the appropriate web report based on the report name and filter that has been assigned.

Of course, the more drill-throughs you come up with means you have to create a duplicate one for every measure. If you have 3 measures, then you will need to create 3 x the number of reports.

(Thanks for finding this Christine)