Drill Through Pointers for Deployment

Recently, I updated and moved a drill through target report. Soon after, the Source reports started throwing drill-through links error. It was later that I figured out that the target report was moved to another folder prior to import for back-up reasons. This caused the drill through in the source reports to break.

A drill through source and target report are linked to each other through their search path and ID. When a target report is moved around the source report specification gets updated with the new path without having to make any modifications.

This can prove to be a boon to some and a head-ache to others while doing deployment. The administrator doing deployments should keep the above point in mind while doing deployments involving drill through reports else it will result in broken links.

Let us consider a scenario where we have a Source Report and a Target report in Folder 1.

Now the Target Report is moved to My Folders and a newer version of the Target Report is imported into Folder 1. The Source report link to the target report breaks.

The reason is when the Target report was moved to My Folders the Source report re-pointed to this new path. Even when a newer version of the report with the same name is pasted in the same path the Source report's spec points to the new path and the Source Report ID is linked to the older Target report ID. Hence the links from the Source report break.

Until the ID connection between the Source and Target Report is lost, deployments need to be done carefully. An ID association is lost when Target report is deleted or the Target report is imported separate from the source report.