Viewer Drilldown to another worksheet/report

Question

I have Report 1 Main Report having a hierarchy such as:
Total Company > Region > Department, having say count of employees. I want to pass parameters to a second worksheet or report showing, say, a breakdown of employees by type for the particular unit highlighted on report 1 e.g. breakdown of employees for total company or breakdown for a particular region/department.
I can do this in Discoverer Client using drill to another worksheet. This is not available in Viewer.
I have tried to simulate this by creating a calculated item in administrator which builds a URL to call a second report, but I cannot get it to pass the parameters relevant to the specific hierarchical unit on report 1.
Any ideas ?

Answer 1

Hi Derek
I am glad I was able to help. Yes, because you want to use hyperdrilling you do indeed need to get hold of 10.1.2. You also need to use the Plus version to create the hyperdrills because Desktop does not have this capability. You can then drill from one worksheet to another one that can either be in the same workbook or another workbook. The execution of hyperdrills works in Plus, Viewer and Desktop although for some reason the passing of parameters from a worksheet in Desktop seems not to work.
You can pass either worksheet1's parameters or the actual cell values. As mentioned above this works fine in Plus and Viewer, but Desktop has an issue with passing anything other than cell values. Presumably this is a bug!
Still, notwithstanding the above, you will find the new feature really easy to use and you will wonder how you ever managed without it.
One more restriction is that you cannot pass multiple values in a parameter. Let's say you have a customer parameter and you select two customers. The initial query works fine and it displays the data for the two customers. Now lets build a hyperdrill to another worksheet that also has a parameter for the customer. When the link is executed only the first customer will be passed. Again this is a bug, verified by a TAR that I raised.
The workaround is to build multiple single valued parameters such as Customer1, Customer2, Customer3 and so on. This does work and I have worksheets that pass multiple items this way. I even allow the user to key the value NONE into the 2nd or 3rd parameter and built special conditions to trap these. Here is an example:
Customer = :Customer1 OR
Customer = DECODE(:Customer2, 'NONE', :Customer1, :Customer2) OR
Customer = DECODE(:Customer3, 'NONE', :Customer1, :Customer3)
Hope this helps
Regards
Michael