Drilling Down on Charts

If you create a Group chart, you ll notice the mouse cursor change to a magnifying glass when you point to a chart element. This drill-down cursor indicates that you can double- click a chart element that you re interested in to drill down on the chart. When you drill down on a chart element, another tab appears next to the Preview tab for the particular group you drilled down on. Drill-down allows your report viewer to interact with charts, much as they interact with group footer and group header subtotal and summary fields.

By creative use of Group charts and hiding of details and group header/footer sections, you can create a very visually appealing interactive report for use in online reporting environments. You could, for example, create a large Group pie chart and place it in the report header, along with grand totals and text objects. You might add a text object that directs the viewer to double-click a pie slice for more information. You may also set Tool Tip text for the chart, prompting the viewer to double-click the slice they re interested in. Select the chart and right-click, choosing Format Chart from the pop-up menu. Then, use the Conditional Formula button to add Tool Tip text.

To add even more interactivity, you could add lower-level Group or Advanced charts in the report s group headers or footers, hiding them with the Section Expert. When the user drills down on the higher-level chart in the report header, a drill-down tab showing a more detailed chart will open . You can create drill-down levels until the user eventually reaches details sections to see low-level transaction data.

Get more information about creating multiple groups, drill-down, and hidden sections in Chapters 3 and 10.

Tip

Drill-down is available and useful only when viewing a report in its native format. Viewers can drill down on reports displayed right on the Preview tab of Crystal Reports by using a report integrated with a custom Windows application, or by using Crystal Reports web-based viewers , including Crystal Enterprise (discussed in Part II of this book). Drill-down doesn t work with reports exported to other file formats, such as Word and Excel. Obviously, drill-down won t be effective with printed reports.