Essbase provides URL-based drill-through access from Essbase client reporting interfaces (such as Smart View or Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting) to information located on Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) applications.
This documentation discusses the ability to drill through to information hosted on Oracle ERP and EPM applications, which differs from the concept of drill-through as described in Integration Services and Essbase Studio documentation. In this documentation, drill-through refers to the ability of an Essbase database cell to link to information contained in another Oracle application. In Integration Services and Essbase Studio documentation, drill-through refers to linking a multidimensional database cell to further data; for example, to transaction-level data that is stored in a relational source.
When you deploy an Essbase database using Oracle General Ledger or Oracle Hyperion EPM Architect, you use the Essbase API to populate the Essbase database with information about which Essbase database cells are valid regions enabled for drill-through access to the enterprise-reporting applications.
For each Essbase drillable region of an Essbase database, you enable drill-through access by means of a URL. Use the Essbase API to populate the Essbase database with the URL information, as well as the drillable-region information. The URL displays to users of the Essbase client interfaces as a link associated to a cell which provides access to related information hosted by Oracle ERP and EPM applications.
For example, in Smart View, a cell represents actual sales data for Cola in the New York market in January. Color-coding on the cell indicates that there are reports associated with the cell. This particular cell could have multiple links associated through which the user can scroll. Each link is enabled by a URL. When the user clicks on a link, the URL is validated, and a launch page, hosted by the ERP or EPM application, displays in a Web browser.