Drill down and roll up
Businesses often have hierarchical structures, such as organizational charts, product hierarchies, or geographical hierarchies. Navigating complex hierarchical data is an essential aspect of BI reporting – users should be able to drill down into more detailed information or drill up to view higher-level summaries. Let’s see how we can use Inforiver to navigate hierarchical structures and gain insights at different levels of granularity.
To enable drill down, we first need to activate the ‘Performance mode.’
When the performance mode is enabled or disabled, all changes like formatting or filters will be reset, and the report will be restored to the default configuration.
The drill down/roll up buttons will work only when the Expand to level option is set to ‘Native’. This option is automatically set when the performance mode is enabled. To view this setting, navigate to Display > Hierarchy > Expand to level. You can still expand any given level of the hierarchy by selecting the corresponding number, however drill-down/roll-up will work only when this option is set to ‘Native’.
In the image below, we have a four-level hierarchy in the rows. Notice the drill down/roll up icons on the visual as highlighted.
Let’s take a look at the drill-down/ roll-up operations in detail.
1. Drill up
The roll-up button can be used to navigate to the immediate upper level of the hierarchy, i.e., the parent level of the currently expanded level. To demonstrate this, we have used the roll-up icon to navigate from the ‘Segment’ level to the ‘Sub-category’ level.
2. Drill down
Enable the drill-down mode to select and expand a particular node in the hierarchy. Only the immediate parent and children of the selected node will be displayed, while the rest of the hierarchy is hidden. To see this feature in action, let’s turn on drill down and select the ‘Accessories’ row.
3. Drill down to the next level
You can traverse the hierarchy level-by-level using this button. Only the child nodes belonging to a particular level of the hierarchy will be displayed. In the example, notice how all the child nodes for the ‘Furniture,’ ‘Office Supplies,’ and ‘Technology’ categories are displayed on drilling down. When we click the button again, the child nodes under level 3 of the hierarchy are displayed, i.e., the segment level.
4. Expand one level
You can expand the hierarchy to the next level and display the child nodes using this option. With each click, you can traverse the entire hierarchy, level by level.
Inforiver offers advanced support for hierarchical data structures which we will be covering in the upcoming sections.
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