Linking within Graphed Images
The ability to provide hyperlinks within graphs too often goes unnoticed. To see a working example, see our Crazy Bikes demo site (Sales By Year — Business Intelligence). As you can see by following the hyperlink, we have a Ship Year, Units Shipped, $ Revenue, and $ Profit field. I compiled the application, sequencing the Ship Year field with subtotals, using the Report with Graph template.
As you can see, we have a few things to do within m-Painter.
- The first thing that needs to be modified is that the Year field is being subtotaled/totaled on my report. m-Power does this automatically because Ship Year is numeric. I need to delete my subtotal and grand total Ship Year.
Click inside the Subtotal level within the Ship Year column. Next, click the "Insert Date Field" icon from the m-Painter toolbar. Select the Ship Year from the Last row of Detail. Click "OK".
- On Crazy Bikes, we are not graphing the Grand Total; rather, we are graphing the subtotal. To make our example do this, we need to make one simple modification. Right-click on the graph and select "Graph Properties". In the "Graph Properties" window, select the "Levels" tab and then choose the radio button next to the "Subtotal" level. Click "OK".
- The final step of this process is to activate the ability to link and to specify the proper URL. Right-click on the graph and select "Graph Properties". Navigate to the "Options" tab and then select the "Drilldown" button. Within this view, you can activate graph linking and modify it appropriately. In the example below, graph smartlinking is active, and it will link to retrieval 10. It will also pass "CUSNO" to the retrieval. More information about parameter passing can be found here.
- Click "Save" and run your application.
In the Crazy Bikes example from above, at run-time you will see this screen:
By clicking on one of the graphed bars (2009, Bicycles), I am redirected to this page:
