Complex navigation & use of intermediate reports,NOT for the feint-hearted!

Question

Hi all,
I'm trying to setup qutie complex navigation...
I have a report that provides metrics based on the organizational structure, which in the dashboard is presented to the penultimate level, and permits a drill down to the lowest level (centre). At the rpd level, the metrics (sales metrics) are defined at the centre level to which the organization structure dimension is linked. We have a metric defined which flags whether the centre at which the sale is made is the same as the centre to which the employee is assigned/usually works at (this has all been loaded by the ETL). We then have a count distinct metric (Num of Employees) on the sales reps ids for those records in the fact table that have this previous flag marked. All of this works as expected.
The dashboard displays this last metric described (Num of Employees) against the organizational structure. Again, OK. But we need to navigate after clicking on this metric, to another report, which displays all sales assigned to those employees (regardless of centre at which they were made), i.e. if the metric shows "6", then after clicking on this value, the "final" report to which we navigate must show all sales for those 6 employees. Naturally the table in the dashboard where the user clicks does not display the employee data, as it displays results at the centre level, so some kind of "intermediate" report which obtains those 6 employee IDs is necessary (this is how it would be done fore example in SQL). We have done this creating a report with employee IDs, a calculated field which compares the two centre values (as in the flag defined in the RPD), and finally contains the 4 organizational structure fields which need to obtain the values from the first report on the dashboard (ive assigned filters to these, which point to the correponding columns in the dashboard report). So, in theory this report would list the employee IDs we are counting in the "Num of Employee" metric. The "final" report then only needs to filter the values in the Employee Id column based on the employee IDs listed in the "intermediate" report.
The error im getting is: "State: HY000. Code: 10058. [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: HY000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred. [nQSError: 17001] Oracle Error code: 7455, message: ORA-07455 ..." the oracle error message given is that the query exceeds the time limit allowed by the database as the query is estimated in hundreds of hours. The main reason I think this may be ocurring is because the intermediate report is accepting as filter ALL values in the columns ive indicated, where as what is actually need is that it take only the value of the organizational structure columns that correspond to the metric the user has clicked on. I.e. the filter instead of reading only the specific organizational values, is reading all the values in the table, and hence the query is not permitted.
Has anyone achieved anything similar???
Edited by: zjac on Sep 20, 2008 12:42 PM

Answer 1

by using Direct database request your bypassing all the wanderful metadata you built in the BMM layer, as such much functionality is not available.
If you really need to use such complex SQL, I would suggest creating an inline view in the phyiscal layer and at least model this through your BMM either as a flat data source (ie include the dimension columns and model the same inline view into your BMM star)
If you do that, the BI Server will know what other logical columns this data source can relate you and you should find the navigation works as expected.
If you dont fancy that good practice, have a look at creating GOURL formulas as the column fx's, format as HTML to present the data as a hyperlink and manually pass all the parameters to the 2nd report.
I'd do the first option, its more inline with intended use.
What cant you do using the 'normal modelling / answers techniqes with union (see combined request in answers) and complex sql (evaluate function in RPD)??