Analyzing your business at different levels of granularity with ReportPlus

With the release of ReportPlus version 3.0 the ability to link dashboards was introduced for Enterprise users. This means users can establish navigation paths across dashboards. For instance you are able to create one dashboard with a high level view of your business, and allow users to drill down across dashboards with greater levels of detail whenever the user taps on a widget, grid row, or chart column.

The Company 360 Example

Let’s see what this can do for users with one example. The following dashboard shows key performance indicators for different areas of the organization.

For users browsing this dashboard, tapping on the operations widget takes them to the Operations dashboard that follows.

When he’s done analyzing he can go back to the original dashboard with the back button named after the departure dashboard.

In this way a manager could get a first high level view of the business with the first dashboard and then drill down on the specifics of the different areas of the organization.

How to configure the navigation

In order to enable this behavior you have go to the actions panel in the Widget Editor, and configure the trigger event.

Possible events to trigger the navigation are: Maximize, or Row Tap. Maximize fires whenever the user taps on a widget in the dashboard. The Row Tap event fires when a user taps on a grid's row, or in a Chart data item, such as a chart column. The row tap is able to pass as parameter the value of a column of choice, for the selected row. For instance, if a list of countries is displayed in a widget, tapping on a row may open a dashboard with the details of a specific country selection. In this case the country would be passed as parameter to the opened dashboard, which would preload a global filter with the received country value.

Once you set the event you select the dashboard to open, and the parameters to pass to the opened dashboard.

Parameters

The dashboard of arrival may receive information in the form of parameters for it’s global filters. In this way it’s possible to preset the filter values when the dashboard is opened, providing the required context for the user navigating the dashboards.

Parameters may be assigned a literal, fixed value, or they may be assigned the value of one of the global filters of the departure dashboard.

Closing thoughts

In this article we’ve seen how dashboards can be linked to provide a continuous navigation, allowing a drill down experience, which enables you to analyze your business at different layers of granularity.

In the company 360 sample, we’ve seen two dashboards linked together, but there’s no limit in the number of chained dashboards. This opens a number of analysis scenarios when the topics and levels of detail can be defined in advanced. For the rest of cases you can rely on the self-service capabilities of ReportPlus to author dashboards tailored to the specifics of the scenario you come across.