Slice and dice your data like a pro using drill though definitions in Cognos Analytics Dashboards

as you begin to analyze your data using cognos you realize pretty quickly that there might be different ways that you would want to slice or dice your data this is the perfect use case for drill throughs so if you hadn't heard the term drill through before this is a mechanism by which you can drill through to more detailed data to see the data that's underlying or driving all of the visualizations in your dashboard or you might want to pass the context that you're looking at in your existing dashboard to a different dashboard that you have you might drill through to that dashboard there's a number of reasons why you might want to drill through but let's take a look at exactly how to set that up so that you can get the most out of your analysis setting up drill throughs in cognos is super easy the first thing we're going to do is show an example where i can drill through to get more data from this pie chart so what i would want to do first is actually build a report to have that detail data so i'm just going to say new report just a very simple one take the blank i'm going to select the same data source where my information that's stored on the dashboard is stored that's using just a very simple loyalty module and all we're going to add in terms of visualization for this is a list i just want a tabular view of the raw data that's driving any specific slice of that pie or anything on that dashboard really and i'm going to add it with content that i think is relevant so first thing is maybe we'll add proverbs of state to this list i could add some other maybe demographic information about uh the people who might be buying that might be interesting you know we're going to add order year for when they bought course quantity sold very important and then maybe just take their loyalty status so this might be a list of all of the information that's relevant to me that i want to drill through to from any visualization on my dashboard so the next thing that we need to do and i'm just going to flip into the actual query that's driving this for a moment is in reporting there's this concept of prompts and what that means is we present the consumer with a choice of how they want to slice or view the data so in this case i'm looking to pass the context of province or state to that detail report so we're going to add a filter that does that i'm going to go to my detail filter i'm going to choose the my province or state field and i'm going to prompt on that so that could be in meaning you can select multiple regions and pass that into the report if i put equals here it would only be one but we want to allow for multiple selections so i'm going to say in province state in and we'll just call this prompt location so the syntax there is just question mark any any type or name of the prompt that you want to give it and then a question mark at the end so location is the name of my parameter if you want to think of it as a parameter and it's going to come from the province or state field now i could go through and i'm just going to flip this to optional because it doesn't need to run it's just the consumer's choice whether they want it to run but i could add different parameters to each one of these fields so that no matter what object i select on my dashboard i'm going to pass that context here into the report but let's just keep it at province or state for sake of simplicity i'm going to save this as let's put it in my content and let's call it detail report sample now flip back to my dashboard and here i'm going to select the visualization and we have these drilled this drill through icon here so as i click on this we've got an add new drill through definition that's what i'm going to do so as i do that again i'm just going to go into my content i believe i put that into a specific folder and then i've got detail report sample this is the name of the report that we just created so i'll click ok now it does an interrogation and it finds this prompt or this parameter for location that i defined i'm going to map that to the corresponding field that exists within my dashboard so that's this province or state so now i've mapped province or state to location in the detail report and how do i want to apply this to the dashboard we've got three options i could apply to just specifically this visualization which was the pie chart i could apply that to visualizations in the same connection that use the same data source meaning by default all of these visualizations are connected and use the same widget connection group maybe i'll record a different video that talks about widget connections but for the most part all of these things are connected unless you don't want them to be so you can define multiple connections and how these different visualizations interact but what we'll do is select all visualizations within the same connection that use the same data source the other option would be any visualization on the dashboard that uses the same data source regardless but we'll just take the default so now what that means is if i wanted to slice on say let's take bayern i'm going to right click on bayern i'm going to go to my drill through and it's going to take me to the sample you see that it's past the bayern context i wouldn't have even had to i could even actually remove this from the list if i didn't want to show it because i've right clicked on buy and i already know what it is but i can see some of the information that i've added to my list to show me the types of you know specific detail records that i'm interested in that might be one use case but now if i flip back i could do the same um passing a value from any of the visualizations really on my dashboard because of the how i defined that drill through connection that anything using the same connection so what we'll do is we'll add another drill through by going to that same drill through button on the toolbar and clicking manage and i'm going to add another drill through definition and now here maybe i want to point to an existing dashboard i've got an operational dashboard that that tracks you know maybe specific geo regions that i've created it already exists in this case again target dashboard very generic name i'm going to use again the default of any visualization in the same connection that uses this data source and i'm going to click apply and i've got two options so now if i kind of pick on a different region here i'm going to zoom in on my map here i can pass any one of these states so let me do that i'll pass georgia so right click on georgia now as i click drill through i've got the choice do i want to go to my detail report sample that will give me that list of all of the information i've added or do i just want to pass that to my target dashboard so here i'll take the target dashboard that we just defined and you can see that what it's done is it's sliced the context here of georgia that i passed to the existing dashboard now i can clear this if i wanted to and so i can continue interacting with the existing dashboard this is what it would look like had i not filtered on on specifically georgia but it's allowing me to go back and interact with maybe a new dashboard and really view that within the exact same context that i left on my original dashboard so it's allowing me to slice across if you will into new data new information always continuing along the journey of my data analysis thank you very much

Channel: Matthew Denham

Views: 3,576

Keywords: dataviz, datavisualization, data, dashboards, cognos analytics, cognos, business intelligence, business analytics, analytics

Id: Q1639RYFAs0

Length: 7min 59sec (479 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020