Clickthrough reports are the key to integration
Clickthrough reports are the special kind of drillthrough reports created by Report Builder. They are "special" because they are linked to the parent report automatically, and are generated on the server from special template reports (or from a built-in template if you haven't specified your own yet).
The key value behind Clickthrough reports is that they add tremendous interactivity and depth to every single report you create, without an ounce of effort by the report author. Another, often overlooked advantage is the opportunity to greatly enhance the drillthrough experience across all your reports, by designing rich, custom Clickthrough report templates to be used instead of the built-in ones.
The restrictions on Clickthrough report templates are few. Most importantly, they do not need to be designed in Report Builder (although it's usually a good idea to start there since RB can do some of the basic wiring for you). Instead, you are free to use the full power of RDL in the Visual Studio Report Designer to build rich, powerful detail and summary reports. The exciting part is that your investment here will be leveraged so widely by report authors and consumers. Every Report Builder report will contain Clickthrough links that lead users to these reports to display key information about the data they are looking at.
One final point -- we lamentably failed to include support for external hyperlinks in the initial release of Report Builder. However, this restriction does not apply to Clickthrough reports designed in Report Designer, so building custom Clickthrough templates is a great way to link the Report Builder experience to external applications (e.g. click here to edit this Customer record in MyCRMApp, or click here to process this Invoice, etc.).
Okay, one final final point -- when designing a single-instance Clickthrough report, make sure you use a data region (e.g. List) even though the report will only display values for a single record. Using top-level textboxes without a data region can make the report slower.
Comments
- Anonymous
November 22, 2006
Do you know of any way to turn off clickthrough globally? Specifically on any calculated fields users add themselves? Our users are finding clickthrough to be particularly annoying when they're working with report output in Excel. - Anonymous
December 08, 2006
Where are the security settings for the click through reports? My users get an access denied message when they try to click through but it works fine for the Admins. - Anonymous
September 19, 2007
Hiya, I have created a link to take me to a report that shows the report stats in a graph formatthe link is this"GraphView.rox?Site=' "[SITEID]" ' "Where [SITEID] is a column in a table.However when I click on one of the links I get the error message, SQL incompleate.Thanks - Anonymous
March 05, 2009
As I mentioned in a previous post , due to resource constraints in this release, Report Builder 2.0 is - Anonymous
May 26, 2010
Hi.I am using drill-through reports for a summary - detail report setup. It works fine as long as the detail report parameters are not cascading parameters. Will this not work if the detail has a cascading parameter (meaning, is it a limitation?) or is it that I need to setup the parameter linkages differently?Thanks,Vidya.More details, if it helps explain.....The detail report has 6 parameters- some multi-value, some single value. The fifth one has a drop down that is generated using a function using the values selected in the previous four parameters. This is required to help the user when they run the detail report by itself. This parameter also happens to be a multi-value and cannot allow Nulls - so I cannot pass null in either - I can technically ignore all parameters except param6 as the previous parameters are just used to help narrow down the values to select from in parameter 6. But parameter 6 therefore is also a cascading.Whats happening now is that clicking on the hyperlink is opening up the detail report- but its opened up like its waiting for some param5 and 6 to be entered. The value passed exists in the drop down that is selected when I pass the same value manually. Also, it works fine when I made the drop down for param 5 independent of other parameter values.