Drill Down in OBIEE

Question

Hi, I defined dimensional hierarchy of 6 levels in Repository from a table.
I have a flat table in database which represents the hierarchy and is as below:
some levels have no sublevels and some have. the max levels is five, lets say.
When a level has no sub level, there is null value in the field.
level 1 is top most and level 5 being the lowest level. as below:
http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/2531/29116555.jpg
I have one more table, where I have employee name, employee number. I joined these two tables and
I made a dimensional hierarchy combining these two tables.
In the report, I must see, employee details as child to the last existing level.
So I included employee name as detail for that hierarchy.
Now my problem is,
Ifthere is no sub level for particular level, it is noted as null in the table, so I should see employee name after that level.
That is, when a level is ended, and has no more further levels, it should display employee name as its child level and followed by measure value for that.
For example, in the report, I have to see as:
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/5760/43637216.jpg
When I drill A, it should show me levels, a,b,c,d,empname
when I again click c, since c has no sub levels, it should retrieve employee name as drilldown.
Hope I am clear. I am not able to implement this,
Please help me.

Answer 1

Your describing a ragged hiearchy that is not supported out of the box in OBIEE 10G
Your options :
1) Flatten the hierarchy as part of your ETL process, your level 2 'c' would be populated all the way down the hierarchy, no big deal really, just more columns in the report until you get to Employee Name + Number or whatever you have on your detail / leaf level.
2) use an nvl() function of whatever your source db supports and return a 'no child' or similar value literal string, at least the users will know they hit the bottom of the real data (level 2 in this case) and are now drilling through to the detail level. You could get clever and use a case statement on the value and offer some form of GOURL to another report to stop this drilling (but it wont give you drill in place on the dashboard, it will be a new window)
3) 11G is out as of yesterday, I think this supports ragged hierarchies now does it not ? I've not had a proper play yet, my colleague has been beta testing but some of us have to bill proper days ;-)