MicroStrategy ONE
About drill maps and links
MicroStrategy offers many different ways for you to interact with your data, discover patterns, and draw conclusions. The most guided of these options are simple report manipulations such as pivoting or displaying and hiding subtotals. The most flexible and powerful option is report creation, which allows you to access the entire schema and to use attributes and metrics from any part of the model. Drilling is a middle ground between these extremes, allowing you to navigate from the data that you are viewing to different levels of aggregation as defined by project hierarchies and drill maps. Drilling is sometimes described as enabling investigative workflows.
To define these workflows, you can create drill maps, which determine what happens when you drill on an object in a report. You associate an object with a drill map, to specify the starting location of the drill. The drill paths of a drill map contain the destination of the drill, which can be an attribute, a consolidation, a hierarchy, or a template. For example, the system hierarchy (the default drill map) allows you to drill up from Month to Year, or down to Day, or across to Month of Year (the name of the month).
Linking reports and documents is another tool to present investigative workflows, one that is more flexible than traditional drilling but more constrained than full report creation. The key feature that distinguishes linking from drilling is the ability to use an object (such as an attribute element) on a report to trigger the execution of another report or a document that is substantially different from the original report. For example, a user viewing an Employee detail report can click a link to view a Regional Sales Breakdown document.
A link allows context to be passed to any prompted report or document, whether the destination report or document is related to the original. In contrast, drilling always implies that at least the filter of the drilled-to report is closely connected to the original report. Even the templates of the original and drilled-to reports are usually related, unless the drill path type is set to template. Template drill path types replace the template of the original report with a completely different destination template.