Drill-Down Paths; Create An Alternate Drill-Down Path - IBM Cognos User Manual

Drill-down Paths

Organizing the data in your model into meaningful hierarchies enables your OLAP
report users to analyze the business information at various levels of detail. Each
dimension consists of one or more drill-down paths that typically contain several
drill-down levels.
For example, a typical time dimension consists of the years, quarters, months,
weeks, and days when sales were made. The Products dimension organizes your
sales items by type, brand, model, color, and packaging. The Regions dimension
allows users to drill down to the data by two distinct paths.
As illustrated here, the primary path includes Region, State, and City levels,
whereas the alternate drill-down path converges on the City level by means of a
Branch level.
You can also set up paths that meet at a shared convergence level in the time
dimension, such as Year and Quarter, and Fiscal Year and Fiscal Quarter levels.
Both drill-down paths converge on the Month level. That way, your OLAP report
users can drill down to the monthly data by either the calendar year or their fiscal
year paths.
Tip: You can view and manipulate drill-down paths from the Dimensions pane of
the Categories diagram.

Create an Alternate Drill-down Path

You set up an alternate drill-down structure in a dimension to provide a different
perspective on the data. Each alternate path connects to the primary path at the
convergence level.
Note: In IBM Cognos, alternate drill-down paths are also referred to as alternate
hierarchies within the same dimension.
When you connect several parent categories to the same convergence category, you
must ensure that each category in the convergence level is unique and
unambiguous. No two categories in the level can be derived from the same source
value. Cognos Transformer prompts you to confirm uniqueness when you create
an alternate drill-down path. For more information about resolving uniqueness
problems, consult the index.
68
IBM Cognos Transformer Version 10.1.1: User Guide