1. Implementing Expenses
  2. Set Up Drill Down to Expense Reports and Expense Items from OTBI

Set Up Drill Down to Expense Reports and Expense Items from OTBI

Expenses provides Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence or OTBI reports in these subject areas:

Subject Areas

  • Cash advances

  • Employee expense overview

  • Expense transactions

You can add action links on column, such as expense report identifier or expense report number, to enable users drill down to the appropriate expense report or expense item. These action links use deep link, which is a URL that allows users to open a page in an application without navigating through the application menu structure. Users can easily navigate back and forth from the analysis to the application to review details.

Note: Application pages are displayed to the user based on their security privileges. If the user doesn't have access to a page, a drill down to the page doesn't display anything.

To configure a drill down, you need to perform these tasks:

  1. Create a deep link

  2. Add action links in an OTBI report

Create a Deep Link URL

Here is the format for a deep link URL:

https://<host name>/faces/deeplink?objType=<objecttype>&action=<action>&objKey=<name1=value1;name2=value2...>

The URL contains several parameters and their values. These are some parameters you can use in a deep link URL:

Parameter

Description

object type

The identifier of the application page to be accessed by deep link. You must enter its value in upper case. For example, to create a deep link to access the View Expense Report page, use EXM_VIEWREPORT.

action

The action performed on the page. You must enter its value in upper case. Possible values are NONE, CREATE, EDIT, and VIEW.

name and value

This combination is used to fetch a specific record. For example, to access an expense report with report number 3001001431, set name as expenseReportId and value as 3001001431.

Here is an example of a deep link URL:

https://<host name>/faces/deeplink?objType=EXM_VIEWREPORT&action=VIEW&objKey=expenseReportId=3001001431

Add Action Links in an OTBI Report

Here are the steps to configure drill down in an OTBI report:

  1. To build a report, on the OTBI home page, click New > Analysis.

  2. Select a subject area. For example, you can select the Expenses Transaction Real Time subject area. The Criteria tab of the new OTBI appears.

  3. From the Subject Area pane, select a column and drag it to the Selected Columns section. Repeat the step to add all the columns you need in your report.

  4. To add an action link, click a column and select Column Properties from the context menu.

  5. In the Column Properties dialog box, click the Interaction tab.

  6. In the Value section, select Action Links as the primary interaction.

  7. Click the Add Action Link icon.

  8. In the New Action Link dialog box, click the Create New Action icon and then select Navigate to a Web Page.

  9. Enter the deep link URL of the target page in the URL field and click Define Parameters. The values of parameters in the URL are changed to tokens and their values are defined in the Value column of the Define Parameters section. As an example, this table shows input parameters.

    Parameter Name

    Value

    Fixed

    Hidden

    Optional

    1

    		 
    EXM_VIEWREPORT

    Y

    Y

    N

    2

    		 
    VIEW

    Y

    Y

    N

    3

    		 
    (Column value) - Select Expense report id

    Y

    Y

    N

  10. If the value of a parameter needs to be obtained from a column in the report, in the Value column, select Column Value and then select the column from which the value needs to be derived.

  11. After you've defined all the tokens in your URL, click Options.

  12. In the Action Options dialog box you can configure how information is displayed to the user when the drill down action is invoked. For example, if you select the Open In New Window option, the target page is displayed to the user in a different tab from the OTBI report.

  13. Keep clicking the OK buttons to close all dialog boxes until you reach the Criteria tab.

  14. Save the changes.

  15. To test the drill down functionality, click the Results tab. The report is displayed in the Compound Layout pane.

  16. In the report, click a cell in the column to which you added the action link. The target page is displayed.

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