Slightly off topic today but if you are working with OBIEE in conjunction with BIP its not that far off. Some of you may know, I now get to play with the whole BI suite, I have been for nearly 2 years.

Today, I was working with BIEE and wanted to share what I thought was a neat trick. I have to thank Rob Lindsley on our team for the pointers to get it working. The problem I had was that I had set up a drill down hierarchy that took the user down a couple of levels to the bottom project number level. I needed for the user to then be able to click the project number to navigate across to another more detailed report on that project. By default, there is no link, you are at the bottom of a hierarchical drill!

There is nothing you can do in the data model (that Im aware of) but you can use a neat trick to get BIEE to allow you to navigate from the bottom rung of the hierarchy. Add the bottom level column to an Answer report. Go into the column properties and set the navigation target.

The trick is to then set the current column properties as the system-wide default for that column. You can then actually delete the column from your report.

Now as you drill down the hierarchy and reach what was the bottom you will still have a link for the user to punch over to the detail report, sweeeet! The other benefit is that whenever you add the column to a report the link will be available to the detail report, unless you want to override it of course.