For years in all kinds of applications, I have been creating reports and dashboards.
One of my recommendations has always been to always add drill downs to transactional pages where applicable, to make the reports more interesting, more interactive, more actionable e.g. any opportunity name, account name or contact name should have a link to drill to the related page to make changes to the listed opportunity, account or contact.
What I learned in previous applications is exactly what I applied in Sales Cloud. I created drill downs using a technique called ‘Deep Linking’. With deep linking, a URL to a page is constructed that will open up a specific data record in an application screen. I would for instance create a drill down on an opportunity name that would call a URL that would target the opportunity edit page and call the opportunity in question.
The trick was knowing how to assemble the URL correctly. Unless you run into an application like Oracle Sales Cloud where you do not need to know how to make a deep link, as there is a much simpler way to do so.
Let me use an example to show how simple it is to create a drill down in a report.
Preparing your report for a drill down
Let me create a report that contains opportunity names. I want to make sure end-users can click on the opportunity name in the report to navigate to the opportunity edit page to make changes to the opportunity.
1) For this, I have added both the ‘Opportunity Name’ and the ‘Opportunity ID column in the report criteria.
2) Under the column properties for the ‘Opportunity ID’ column, I made sure the ‘Opportunity ID’ is hidden.
3) Navigate to the report results view
4) Edit the table view on which you want to make the drill down visible
5) Make sure the ‘Opportunity ID’ column is located directly to the right of the ‘Opportunity Name’ column, and not in the Excluded section, which is often used as an alternative to hide a column.
The report from here on is ready for adding the drill down.
Adding the drill down
6) On the ‘Opportunity Name’ column, where we want the drill down to be visible as a link, in the column properties, under ‘Interaction’, choose ‘Action Links’ as primary interaction
7) Tick the checkbox to only display an interaction popup when multiple actions are available.
8) Choose an action of type ‘ADF Contextual Event’. No need to specify anything else. No need to point the action anywhere, Sales Cloud will figure it out for you.
And that is it ! Close all windows, save your report and run it from within Sales Cloud to test it. The drill down does not work in the report preview mode as it lacks the Sales Cloud context there.
How to get back
And the greatest thing of all is that once you update the opportunity and hit the ‘Save and Close’ or ‘Cancel’ button on the opportunity screen, you are brought back to the report instead of to the opportunity list.
A truly seamlessly experience!
I received some comments from followers who seemed to have issues to get this to work so I recorded a YouTube video to explain this in more detail
