Drill Down with BIP in EBS

22/09/2010 by Simon Tomey.

The heart’s desire of every accountant is to be able to see a report and then click on a section of this to get further detail. We’ve found a way of doing this using BI Publisher in EBS.

The classic situation (which is so well catered for by the likes of Discoverer and BI Answers) is the ability to drill down to further information when performing analysis. You get your top level summary report and you want more information for the areas that are of interest to you. For example imagine wanting the account analysis report information, but summarised by account code with the ability to drill down to the sub-ledger detail underneath. Well now you can.

We’ve managed to set this up using bursting in BI Publisher. By creating a series of templates which hold all the information required for all the various drill down permutations, we can enable users to start with a top level report and drill through various paths to open further detailed reports.

The great news is, that this uses the standard free, integrated Oracle BI Publisher bursting technology. It’s a little complex, but not so complex that we can’t show you how to build you own suites of reports. Just look out for all those accountants, with the desires of their hearts fulfilled…

See below for a mock up we’ve done of this. (yes I know the totals don’t quite add up, but you get the idea of how to do it, I hope).

We create a series of templates which allow the user to jump from one report to another, to follow a “drill path”, using automatically generated hyperlinks.

We run the bursting request to create all the output files, populate the hyperlinks and send them to the appropriate folders.

The user then opens the top level report (either from the directory, or just viewing the output).

The report then contains a series of automatically generated hyperlinks which will follow the “drill path” you have specified when you designed the report.

The hyperlinks enable the user to “drill down” to further levels of detail. (The hyperlink merely opens a new report relevant to the item selected).

The number of drill down levels are not limited (but you may wish to keep it to just a few).

You may wish to enable users to go directly to the full detail.

I’ll post an update when we have done more. Meanwhile you might need to get us in to train you so you can make your own journey of discovery in satisfying the heart’s desire of your accountants.

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