dynamically generating drill through targets from data item (or like)

[tlambert]

Hi,
I searched help and the forum and found no matches.

I'm looking to specify a drill through target using a data item. Essentially, I want to set up a dataset in report studio that is a report inventory which includes report descriptions, author comments, date completed, etc. I want the inventory to have a variable in it that allows for the direct drill through to the specific inventory in the report. I can make this variable into anything needed to make the drill-through work. 

To get it to all work, I'd like to create a report which queries the report inventory, and then creates a drill through link for each report which satisfies the query parameters.

Any advice would be helpful, including any documentation which may already exist that I haven't found yet.
Thanks,
Tom Lambert

[CognosPaul]

If I understand the request correctly:

You have a series of reports, the names of which are stored as strings in a database. You want to be able to list the reports as drillthrough links to allow users to simply click on each one to send them to the correct report.

This is impossible with traditional drillthroughs. However you can do this fairly easily by using parameterized URLs.

One of the appendices in the administration and security guide details how to call reports with URLs. If you click on the properties of any of the reports you can see the direct link to the report.

Once you understand how to call reports with URLs the only hard part is constructing the URL with the correct field.

In order to do this you can use an HTML Items with the source type Report Expression.

Place one before the field in the list:

Code Select Expand

'<a href=URL up to the report&report=[' + [Report Data Item] + '])'>

And close the anchor tag with another after the field.

(I'm not at a Cognos install so I can't give an exact example of the direct link URL)

[tlambert]

Thank so much for your help. You understood the issue correctly and I think I can try what you've dsecribed.  This may be a good solution for us, but will take some adapting as we have to go through development and UAT before the final reports hit production. I will/would have to anticipate what the direct link will be to the reports.

I submitted a Cognos support request. They said what I was trying to do (with the drill through links) was not possible without the SDK. This URL describes the SDK based solution.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21345278

[CognosPaul]

I've got to admit, I've never even touched the SDK but it looks interesting. The code looks like it's directly pulling the list of reports directly from the content store based on the user credentials. It should be easy to fix it up to meet modern HTML standards (get rid of the tables, for instance)

It's also worth mentioning that you can embed these reports in iFrames. I have a system set up similar to the one you're trying to achieve. The outside report is two column report. Simply a couple of repeaters, one going across the top, one going down the left, with the right column containing an iFrame. The repeater on the left feeds the name of the report to the iFrame, while the repeater on the top passes the parameter. There's a popup menu with additional global filters and a value prompt to let the user select which format the report is in.

[tlambert]

I will look into using iFrames.

Thank you very much for rour response. It has helped me solve the issue without having to purchase the SDK, but only because I have the list of report search paths loaded as source data.

One issue I ran into was being forced to re-login after following the hyperlink. I was able to get around this by making the URL relative rather than absolute.  More info was found here: http://www.cognoise.com/community/index.php/topic,9413.0.html