Drillthrough report pages enable report authors to anticipate the needs of users to view the details associated with a particular item such as a product or customer. Since it's unknown which specific item the user will need to analyze during a self-service session in Power BI, generic drillthrough report pages can be designed that highlight the most relevant dimensions and metrics such as the product list price or the first purchase date of the customer. Drillthrough report pages update to reflect the filter context of the user's selection (for example, Product ABC) on a separate report page.
In the following example, a report page has been designed with a drillthrough filter set to the Product Name column:
The drillthrough report page provides a mix of high-level sales and margin metrics as well as seven product dimension columns in the Product Details table at the bottom. With the drillthrough report page configured, when the Product Name column is exposed on a separate page within the report, the user will have a right-click option to drill to this page as per the following image:
In the preceding example, the user has drilled down through the four levels of the product hierarchy created in Chapter 3, Designing Import and DirectQuery Data Models (Product Category Group, Product Category, Product Subcategory, Product Name) to display a bar chart by the Product Name column. The same right-click drillthrough option is exposed via table, matrix, and other chart visuals including the scatter chart and the stacked column and bar charts.
The Bottom level column of a hierarchy such as the preceding Product Name example is often a good candidate to support with a drillthrough report page. For example, a common analysis pattern is to apply a few slicer selections and then to drill down through the hierarchy levels built into chart and matrix visuals. Each level of the hierarchy provides supporting context for its parent value, but ultimately the report user will want to investigate a specific value (for example, Customer 123) or a specific combination of values (Customer 123 and Calendar Year 2018).