Drilling Down and Up in a Hierarchy


Envision offers methods to navigate hierarchies by drilling down or drilling up. The concept of drill-down analyses in Envision largely denotes the interactive exploration of data, in particular of large databases comprising hierarchical levels. The process of drill-down analyses begins by considering some simple break-downs of the data by a few variables of interest, for example, gender, geographic region, and so on. It is called 'drill down' because it is a feature that allows you to delve deeper into more specific layers of the data or information being analyzed.

You may want to 'drill-down' to expose and further analyze the underlying data of any given category. Again, statistical and graphical summaries can be computed for only those scenarios which might suggest further break-downs by other variables, for example, (Product Line, Product Vendor, Product Name and so on.). The lowest (leaf) level has the raw data.

You can set up further levels of drill down within the report – practically as many as supported by the data. Typically, the template of each level of the report is similar, but what changes is the granularity of the data. Drill down greatly enhances reporting performance – by only presenting one layer of data at a time, and reduces load on the server at query time for optimizing reporting performance.

You must first assign a hierarchical dimension that can be used for various drill down operations at several levels. For example, if you assign the ProductVendor dimension to the ProductLine dimension, you can drill down to the ProductLine to see, for example, the order status of all product vendors with respect to individual product lines.

For more information on creating Hierarchical dimensions, see Defining Hierarchical dimensions.

Drilling up and down in a hierarchy

1.   From the Dimensions pane, set up a hierarchical dimension for drilling down.

2.   Open the chart from which you want to drill down, and switch to 'Viewer' mode.

3.   Select the dimension/area on the chart that you want to drill down from, and then select Drill Down.

The drill down now displays the break-down of the selected category or dimension.

4.   To drill up and return to the main chart, click the < icon.