Enabling Automatic Content Linking in WebFOCUS Designer With Auto Linking

Auto Linking makes it easy to connect reports and charts in your development environment, expanding the reporting capabilities of your organization. Using Auto Linking, you can dynamically link multiple charts and reports with a single report or chart of any format, based on their common sort (BY) fields and parameters referenced in any filters. It is this commonality that dynamically links content in your WebFOCUS repository, allowing you to discover new possibilities in your data, and explore new relationships within your reporting enterprise. In addition, Auto Linking saves development time and effort, because drilldowns do not need to be manually created and maintained.

To use Auto Linking, you must use the AutoLink option in WebFOCUS Designer to set the reports or charts that provide Auto Linking drilldowns. In addition, you must also set reports or charts to be Auto Link targets. The options to enable and disable Auto Linking and Auto Link target functionality are available on the Settings pane, located beneath the buckets on the WebFOCUS Designer Properties panel.

Auto Linking and Auto Linking target status can only be enabled for stand-alone content items. If you convert a chart or report with Auto Linking to a page, a warning appears, alerting you that Auto Linking functionality will not be carried over.

Note: You can open an existing chart and enable Auto Linking or set the item as an Auto Link target.

When Auto Link functionality is activated, tooltips in your charts can display links in the tooltip for each sort (BY) field with qualifying target reports or charts at run time. In Auto Link enabled charts, you can add sort (BY) fields to the Vertical Axis, Horizontal Axis, or Color field containers. In Auto Link enabled reports, Auto Linking drill-down links are added to each sort value for which there are Auto Link targets available.

To qualify a chart as an Auto Link target, you must include filters that contain the parameters that you selected as the sort field or fields in Auto Linking enabled content. The parameter names defined in these filters must be the same as the sort (BY) field names in the Auto Link enabled chart. For example, if you Auto Linking enabled content uses Product Category as a sort field, then the Auto Linking targets that are available will be those that have parameters for the Product Category field. When you select a chart as the Auto Link target, it specifies that the parameter information should be cataloged, and will be evaluated when an Auto Link enabled chart is run.

For an Auto Link enabled chart or report at run time, the target reports and charts are those that have filters with parameters for all sort fields. For run time for charts, the linked sort field values in the Auto Link enabled content is passed to the Auto Link target report or chart and used as a filter value.

For example, you may have an Auto Link enabled chart that contains sort (BY) fields, Product Category and Model, with a measure (Sum) field, Revenue. To qualify as an Auto Link target, other charts in your repository can contain a single filter with a parameter for Product Category, or two filters with parameters for both Product Category and Model. When you run the Auto Link enabled chart, the Product Category field will link to target reports or charts that have a filter with a parameter for Product Category, and the Model field will link to target reports or charts that have filters for both Product Category and Model.

You can access the target reports or charts from a tooltip option that displays when you point your mouse over an area of the chart, such as a bar that represents Revenue by Product Category and by Model.