A common function of a WebFOCUS report is to drill down to another report or the
same report with different parameters. Below is an example of a report that drills
down to another report that takes the car brand as a parameter.
Figure 1. This is the report that shows all the cars and their lengths. The user
can click on any of the car brands to drill down to more details.
Figure 2. This is the report after the person has clicked on ALFA ROMEO. It shows
all the models for ALFA ROMEO
It’s straight forward to drill down but drilling back up is another story. There
are WebFOCUS implementations that include implementing a back button. Really, it
just calls the javascript function history.go(-1). Another option is to have parameterized
links on the reports to navigate back to a selected value but it does take some
planning to make this work properly.
A javascript / jquery alternative
I decided to take the approach of using a bread crumb trail to drill back up. In
addition, I chose to use javascript / jquery because I know I could package it up
into a clean library that requires only cutting and pasting a small code block (and
a little bit of configuring).
Here’s what it looks like:
Figure 3. This shows the Home bread crumb
Figure 4. This shows the selected value bread crumb and the ability to click home
You can download the how-to file
here.
Enjoy!
posted @ Monday, July 09, 2012 9:44 AM