Drilling Down into a Client Report Using the Web Client

Purpose

Use this Serena® Dimensions® CM web client operation to drill down into a client report.

Client reports may end up displaying large amounts of data, and displaying everything in one report is not always the clearest way to present the information. For all types of reports apart from simple listing reports, the Dimensions web client first creates a top-level report that displays only summarized data. Certain areas on these summary reports are mouse-sensitive, allowing you to drill down to see underlying data. This is the concept of a drilldown report.

A summary report is displayed either:

Directly by accessing a report (apart from a simple listing report) in the Reports navigation pane for a particular object class.
By accessing the Preview tab when creating or modifying a report.

Drilldown reporting also makes reports highly interactive by enabling you to zoom in from a more general view of a business perspective to a more granular one at a simple click of the mouse.

Once you drill down from a summary report, the report format will be the same as that presented by a listing report, except that there will be:

A link to enable you to return to the summary report, in addition to
the normal button to enable you to display the drilldown report as an HTML page suitable for printing, and
the normal button to enable you to display a text format page of comma separated variables (CSV) suitable for importing into other tools.

Once you access a drilldown report or a listing report, the toolbar area will also be populated with "grayed out" standard buttons appropriate to the object class you are reporting on, for example, for items you would have toolbar buttons such as check in and check out.

Selecting one or more of the objects in the content pane will activate the toolbar buttons and you will then be able to perform all the usual operations pertinent to that particular object class.

In addition, if you click on the active underlined ID for a particular object (if present), the Dimensions web client will invoke the Open dialog box appropriate to that object class, for example, Open Item.

IMPORTANT! While creating or modifying a report that creates a preliminary summary report, the Preview tab will display the summary report and enable you to drill down to the drilldown report to see what it would look like. However, there are no toolbar buttons or active object IDs in the preview drilldown report—you will only get these once you save the report you are creating or modifying.