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Crystal Reports: Drill Down Reports at One Level

Drill Down Reports are among the powerful features available in Crystal Reports. If you have a simple report with one group, one series of subtotals, and some detail information, you can change it into a drill down report by setting "Hide" on Group Header 1 and the detail section.

One thing that makes the drill down work better is to put the Group Name, or some other suitable caption into the group footer. That caption and the subtotals are what appear at the top level. When you drill down with a double click you get the Group Header, Details and Group Footer.

Drill down reports can be viewed and printed at the summary level, or a specific drill down, or any combination of these. They are a useful analysis tools for users at all levels.

Now, here's a twist.

A Chelseatech client wanted a report developed that had three groups (product group, product and customer) with a drill down to the lower level groups. The challenge was that the lowest level actually combined two fields: region and customer. They didn’t want a drill down or summary by region, but at the customer level they wanted customers sorted by region and then customer.

So we used a formula to combine the two fields (Region + Customer) and grouped by that. We customized to group name to display the customer name and placed the region field in the group 3 header.

We then set the conditional suppress on the Group 3 header to

DrillDownGroupLevel <>2 and {Table.Region} = Previous({Table.region})

The top two levels displayed as expected. When the third drill down processed, we got the header section with the region description to appear. This was exactly what the customer wanted.

Use DrillDownGroupLevel function in a formula for your page header

The other useful technique we used on that report was to use a formula for the page title. Inside the formula we used DrillDownGroupLevel to create a level specific heading:

If DrillDownGroupLevel = 0 then "Company Sales Report else

If DrillDownGroupLevel = 1 then "Product Sales: " + {Table.Product} else //etc.

What about drilling down text?

The ability to display a summary page, which can then drill down to see lower level details has been in Crystal Reports for a long time now.

Equally useful is the ability to insert database fields into a text object. This makes Crystal Reports a very useful mail merge tool. We have helped customers design some sophisticated form letters this way.

Be careful if you want your report to use both these features together. If you have a text object with the group name or summary fields inside, then you will not be able to click on that text and drill down. The drill down feature works easily with group names, database fields and summaries. But it doesn’t work with text objects.

If you want to combine some fixed text with some data, use a formula instead of a merged text/data field. The formula can display the same result, with the added advantage that it can also be used to drill down to the next level of the report.

PDFs?

While you may like the fact you can drill down text objects, you probably wish you could enable drill down of PDFs. We have found a way to do this. You need to split your report into a main level report and a separate report for each drill-down level. We have an example available with one level, but the technique could be expanded to cover any number of levels.

The drill-down report needs a parameter to indicate the value needed for that drill-down. Modify the report to display the drill-down view and use the parameter to select the data you need. You can then schedule the report in our cViewSERVER or cViewMANAGER report scheduler.

Our Multirun feature lets you run that drill-down report for each value of the drill-down. This works best with a low number of drill-down values, but if you require more, then that just takes more time. Use the multi-run feature to create unique PDF file names for each value you require. Make sure they all end up in the same folder.

Then in the main report, create a hyperlink on the field you want to use for the drill-down. The hyperlink location will be calculated in a Crystal reports formula. Each value in the main report should take you to the appropriate PDF file for that drill-down value. The nice thing is that if you don’t specify a folder name, the hyperlink will assume the same folder as the main report.

Schedule this second report to output the opening PDF document for the report. The hyperlink field properties are available inside the PDF and will link to the drill-down PDF files. You can then copy all the PDF’s to your web server and the links will move to the new location.

If you require additional levels of drill-down, you just need a naming scheme to calculate a unique PDF file name at each level.

This article is copyright 1999 - 2005 Chelsea Technologies Ltd. It may be freely copied and distributed as long as the original copyright is displayed and no modifications are made to this material. Extracts are permitted. The names Crystal Reports and Seagate Info are trademarks owned by Business Objects.