Essbase provides URL-based drill-through access from Essbase client reporting interfaces (such as Smart View or Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting, Fusion Edition) to information located on Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) applications.
This documentation discusses the ability to drill through to information hosted on Oracle ERP and EPM applications, which differs from the concept of drill-through as described in Integration Services and Essbase Studio documentation. In this documentation, drill-through refers to the ability of an Essbase database cell to link to information contained in another Oracle application. In Integration Services and Essbase Studio documentation, drill-through refers to linking a multidimensional database cell to further data; for example, to transaction-level data that is stored in a relational source.
When you deploy an Essbase database using Oracle General Ledger or Oracle Hyperion EPM Architect, Fusion Edition, you use the Essbase API to populate the Essbase database with information about which Essbase database cells are valid regions enabled for drill-through access to the enterprise-reporting applications.
For each Essbase drillable region of an Essbase database, you enable drill-through access by means of a URL. Use the Essbase API to populate the Essbase database with the URL information, as well as the drillable-region information. The URL displays to users of the Essbase client interfaces as a link associated to a cell which provides access to related information hosted by Oracle ERP and EPM applications.
For example, in Smart View, a cell represents actual sales data for Cola in the New York market in January. Color-coding on the cell indicates that there are reports associated with the cell. This particular cell could have multiple links associated through which the user can scroll. Each link is enabled by a URL. When the user clicks on a link, the URL is validated, and a launch page, hosted by the ERP or EPM application, displays in a Web browser.
ERP and EPM applications create a drill-through URL using Essbase. The drill-through URL is stored in the Essbase database file as metadata.
The number of drill-through URLs per database is limited to 255.
Note: | It the responsibility of the Administrators of the ERP and EPM applications to define drill-through definitions and host the Web pages that they wish to use as targets of drill-through URLs. |
See the following topics, which describe the components of drill-through URLs:
The drill-through URL name is an identifier to manage the defined drill-through URL This name can be different from the URL display name visible to the end user through Essbase clients.
The drill-through URL XML is a block of XML information structured in a protocol that enables Essbase to link specified database regions to information on Oracle ERP and EPM applications. This URL XML is transparent to the end users querying the application. The URL XML is populated by the ERP or EPM applications that deployed the Essbase database. It is not recommended that the Administrator edit the URL XML; however, Essbase does provide the interface to edit the URL XML. The XML block contains the drill-through URL display name, as well as a URL enabling the hyperlink from a cell to a Web interface to occur.
The list of drillable regions is a member specification defining areas of the database that should allow drill-through using the specified URL. The administrator defines the list of drillable regions using a member specification of members from one or more dimensions. Define the member specification using the same Essbase member-set calculation language that you use for defining security filters. For example, the following is a valid member specification, indicating all eastern states, except New York, for months of Qtr1: @REMOVE(@DESCENDANTS("Eastern Region"), “New York”), @CHILDREN(Qtr1).
The number of drillable regions in a drill-through URL is limited to 256. The number of characters per drillable region is limited to 65536.
This flag indicates whether the URL applies only to level 0 descendents of the region specified by the list of drillable regions.
For example, if the level 0 flag is enabled for drillable region DESCENDANTS("Market"), @CHILDREN(Qtr1), then the URL is applicable for all states of Market during all months of Qtr1, and for all level 0 members across remaining dimensions.
For more information about the MaxL statements and APIs referenced in this section, see the Oracle Essbase Technical Reference and the Oracle Essbase API Reference, respectively.
Use the following MaxL statements to manage drill-through URLs:
create drillthrough
alter drillthrough
display drillthrough
drop drillthrough
Use the following Essbase API structures and functions to manage the drill-through URLs on the Essbase database:
C Main API Structure:
ESS_DURLINFO_T
C Main API functions:
EssCreateDrillThruURL
EssDeleteDrillThruURL
EssGetDrillThruURL
EssGetCellDrillThruReports
EssListDrillThruURLs
EssMDXIsCellGLDrillable
EssUpdateDrillThruURL
C Grid API structure:
ESSG_DATA_T
C Grid API function:
EssGGetIsCellDrillable
Visual Basic API structure:
ESB_DURLINFO_T
Visual Basic API functions:
EsbCreateDrillThruURL
EsbUpdateDrillThruURL
EsbDeleteDrillThruURL
EsbListDrillThruURLs
EsbGetDrillThruURL
EsbGetCellDrillThruReports
To manage drill-through URLs in Administration Services, see these topics in the Oracle Essbase Administration Services Online Help:
“Managing Drill-through Definitions”
“Edit Drill-through Definitions Dialog Box”