Analyzing data at summary level is great! it’s gives business users information that they need at summary level to make informed business decisions. But often, they also need to look at details. To satisfy this business requirement, there are two types of reports that you can create in SSRS to show detail level information
1. Drill Down Report.
2. Drill Through report.
So what is the difference in their layout?
Drill Down report:
Note the presence of Toggle Items. + for expand. and – for collapse. As you can see, this makes it easy to go a level below and see the details.
Note the presence of a formatted text. It’s shown like a hyper linked text. For this report, To see Product level detail of Bikes Category, click on Sales Amount for Bikes category & it would take you a drill through report that shows the details:
So when to choose Drill Down report vs Drill Through report?
They have different feature & serves different purposes. But there are two things that help me decide in majority of the cases:
1. Is the performance of Drill Down report acceptable (especially if data is surfaced through stored-procedures/queries hitting the data source without a semantic layer in between)?
Yes? Great. If not, then try drill through reports.
2. Are there too many (30-40+) data items show if a user drill downs? Yes? Try drill through.
Related resources:
Drillthrough, Drilldown, Subreports, and Nested Data Regions (Report Builder and SSRS)
Author
Paras Doshi