Overview of Linked Reports

You can use conditional and unconditional links to link reports together.

Before you create report links, you should be familiar with the variables and runtime selectable filters in the reports or dashboards you’re linking to since you define the values you want to use for these every time you create a report link. In addition, you should know whether you want to use unconditional or conditional links.

• Unconditional links—You can use an unconditional link to open a specific report or dashboard when you drill down on any value in the parent report’s linked column. The content in the linked report or dashboard vary depending on the report’s variables and filters and the value you drill down on, but the same report or dashboard is linked to regardless of the value selected in the parent report’s column. This functionality is similar to drilling down on a value in a column to open another report level.
• Conditional links—You can use conditional links to open different reports or dashboards depending on the value you drill down on in the parent report’s linked column. For example, if a column in your parent report lists contacts’ SLAs (service level agreements), you could add a conditional link for each unique SLA listed in the column. When you click one of the SLAs in the column, a report that shows information specific to that SLA would open. Just as with unconditional links, the content in the linked reports or dashboards can vary depending on the values you specify for the linked reports’ variables and filters.

You create links using the Report Linking wizard or the Conditional Report Linking wizard. The wizards are similar, though the Conditional Report Linking wizard includes an additional step. In addition, the ordering of conditional links is important.

Just as you can drill down into different levels within a report (see Overview of Report Output Levels), you can also drill down into separate reports or dashboards using report linking. This helps avoid database query limitations since linked reports run independently of one another. Using linked reports is also beneficial when you need to create multiple reports with identical drill-down levels, since you can create a single report and link to it from multiple reports instead of re-creating identical levels in multiple reports. See How to Use Linked Reports.

Additionally, if you have very complex reports that attempt to display columns with summaries of data from several tables, you may want to use inline aggregate reporting for more efficient database queries. See Inline Aggregate Reporting.