[RS] Is there a way to drill-through on a crosstab intersection?

[workdan]

Hi all,

I've got a crosstab report used to summarize sales data. I'd like to drill through from this report to more-detailed reports, but I'd like the drill-throughs to be from the crosstab intersections. I can't find a way to do this - I can set up drillthroughs on the crosstab edges, but not from the intersections.

Here's an example of what I'm trying to accomplish:
The rows of the crosstab are locations and (some) of the columns are item groups. The value at the intersection is the count of items in the given item group sold at the given location. I'm trying to set it up so that clicking on that number will drill to a detailed report of items in the given group sold at the given location. But I simply can't apply a drill-through to the intersection.

Could this be because I'm not supplying a measure in the Crosstab Corner? I don't believe I can do that on this report, because the columns include different measures (item count for some columns, sales amount for others, etc.)

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Dan

[Blue]

Have you tried unlocking the crosstab first and then applying the drill through?

It could be that in a crosstab the values in the intersections are not "understood" by the application until run-time.

Can you redo the report as a list instead of a crosstab?

[workdan]

I tried your suggestion that I unlock the crosstab. Doing so allows me to define a drillthrough on the text item that holds the intersection value, but this applies the same drillthrough to every column on the crosstab, which won't work for me. Even unlocked, I cannot apply a drillthrough to the intersection itself.

Some of the things I've seen with crosstabs thus far suggest that your hypothesis is correct - that the intersection values are not defined until runtime. Alas, this continues to lead to problems.

A list won't serve my purposes on this report, as one of the items in the crosstab columns has multiple values (it's a fact, not a measure), while the rest of the columns are measures (which would fit in a list).

It appears to me that crosstabs in Cognos 8 are really built to support analysis of dimensional data (looking at a measure at the intersection of two facts), and not the sort of mixed-mode reporting I'm trying to pull off here. That does give me an idea, though it's a little wacky: I may try defining a crosstab and a list on the same report, organizing them appropriately with sorting and layout objects, to create the illusion of a contiguous report that contains what I need. I'll put in an update on how that goes, or if I find an alternate solution.

Thanks for the reply!

Dan