by Greetings to all,
Today we will see a small use case that will make the Power BI Graphical User Interface as App Like Experience in cross report drillthrough feature. lets take quick look on this,
Well creating back button in basic feature in power bi. Previously using images/buttons and turn on the action and make as Back action. Later Power BI gives inbuilt feature of back button that is very useful and easy to create. In our case we also using back button in the same report multiple tabs. The problem arises is this Back button is working only in a single report, when we use the Cross-Report drillthrough in Power BI this makes user a little bit confusing.
How to set-up cross report drillthrough feature:
Cross Report Drill-through is a feature where we can jump in to different reports in a same workspace that have related content. In Business case, top level management will see only the summary level report that has no detailed insights of the business but analyst or next level of people dig deep into that report and see how their business is running. For this we can create 2 different report one for top management and another one for analysts. By using cross report drillthrough feature we can jump summary report to detailed analyst report with the same filter we carry from summary report. This is the great feature and much more helpful to analyze the business data effectively.
Example:
I have two reports one is source report and another one is target report. I want to enable the cross report feature from source report to cross report. By the way both the reports are different datasets, but there is some common fields among them in the fact table. In our case SKU(Stock Keeping Unit).
Sample data:
lets turn on the cross report feature in the source report desktop file
Now Enable the Target report cross report filter feature in desktop
That all, We can publish those two reports in the same workspace and we can see a drillthrough option from source to target report in PBI service.
But the real problem was the user level experience, If we have multiple tabs/sheets in both the reports also we have BACK BUTTON in both the reports. As a end-user they don’t know how cross-report drillthrough feature works, when they drillthrough from summary or source report to detailed or target report and try to come back previous or summary or source report BACK button becomes trouble to them.
The reason is simple BACK button can navigate through only the same report not navigating to different report. We can give URL in to the BACK button action, but that will create a another tab in the browser that will not a good user experience.
So to avoid this lets include the Target report data into the Source report and connect the field which we want to drill-through, In our case SKU. Also Hide those target report tabs in the source report. Add the drillthrough fields in the Target tabs.
To simply saying we have incorporate the Target report into this same Source Report. After connect with Target data we have to create the same tabs in this source report and make it as hidden. Now it is act like normal drill-through feature but we name the tabs as target page. Now the back button come to the previous stage because technically both tabs are in the same PBI file. So we can navigate to the source using BACK Button.
Of course you thinking right, This is not the Cross-Report Drill-Through. It is a normal drill through feature. I am totally agreed on that but If the user concern more about the BACK BUTTON then this is the easiest solution we have at this time. If we have simple & speed schema modeling we can try this method. If we connect two big complex data modeling then we need to think more. But at this moment we have this option only. If any other ways or ideas you tried that are welcomed !
Hope this may solve in future.
