Enhanced Linking in Pentaho-Reporting
The reporting engine allows to place hyperlinks into many of the available output formats (PDF, HTML, Excel). All of these formats use URLs to specify the target document and to pass parameters to this document. However, at the moment, creating these links is a manual process and thus error prone and requires a rather technical skill-set as most links need to incorporate data from the current report-state (and thus must be computed somehow).
The drill-linking extension provides a declarative way to specify the link target and its parameter in a declarative way. This way, the drill-link definition can be well-defined while at the same time its result can be computed.
The drill-link backend (pentaho-reporting-engine-extensions-dill-down)
The link-computation is performed by a single formula function called "DRILDOWN".
DRILLDOWN
Summary: Computes a drill-down link as text.
Syntax: DRILLDOWN (Text profileName; Text solution; Text reportPath; Text reportId; Array parameter )
Returns: TEXT
Constraints: Parameter-array is a 2x2 array with name value pairs.
{{ "ParamName1" \| "ParamValue1" } \| { "ParamName2" \| " ParamValue2" }}
Semantics: The actual work is done by the profile implementation in the background. Right now, there are two implementations, a simple pattern (message-format) profile and a formula based profile. The profile must be defined in the meta-data. Whether value of solution, reportPath and ReportId is actually used depends on the configuration of the profile given. The parameter array must be given, even if it is empty. Each profile is defined to compute a URL or to throw an Evaluation-Error if some of the values are illegal.