Using Inherited Criteria

The key to DrillDown is the passing of selection criteria from a parent cell to its child using the DrillDown layout. The child layout may have criteria of its own (possibly on other fields than those mentioned in the parent), but any conflicts in criteria must be resolved so that the child query accesses a subset of the data selected from the parent query.

Think of inherited criteria as the equivalent of a scope for the resulting report. The DrillDown layout can have criteria (including nPlosion) for fields that were not included in the original report, and it can have criteria for fields that defined the selected amount from the original report.

Criteria for fields from the original report override any specified in the DrillDown layout, with the exception of nPlosion options, which enable you to see more detail than in the original report.

Within a DrillDown layout, you can specify TimeSpan nPlosion without entering a TimeSpan, since the DrillDown layout inherits the TimeSpan of the original report.

Ledger Inheritance

Ledger criteria can be overridden in a child layout, either by ledgers specified in the child layout or by queries to access tables that do not contain the LEDGER field.

An example of a ledger-based DrillDown that expands ledger criteria compares budget to actual expenditures. Assume that you want to drill down from a budget variance report produced at the business unit level and compare the actual to budget for each department. You can construct a DrillDown layout with DEPTID nPloded in the rows and columns for actuals, budget, and variance. Because PS/nVision allows this layout to override the inherited ledger, you can see each department’s budget performance in a single picture.

Soft Inheritance

You can create a DrillDown with multiple TimeSpans. It is called soft inheritance for TimeSpans. To create a soft inheritance for TimeSpans, you define a DrillDown layout with multiple columns and various combinations of ledgers and TimeSpans.

For example, suppose you have a ledger total posted amount for the year 2001. You want to show year 2001’s detail amounts, which make up this total amount in one column, with 2000’s detail amounts in the column beside it. You define a DrillDown layout with two amount columns. One column has no TimeSpan, (although you might specify nPlode TimeSpans), and the other column specifies a TimeSpan, such as YTD-1YR. When you drill down, the first column inherits the TimeSpan, year 2001, from the parent cell; and the other overrides the TimeSpan from the parent cell and uses its own defined year 2000 TimeSpan.

Note:

Soft inheritance only controls when you drill down to a tabular layout. It does not function for matrix layouts.