Beginning Oracle® Application Express

6.1. Drill-Down Charts

As discussed in the last chapter, a chart is a great way to give a high-level overview of your data. But users, curious types that they are, may be enticed by those high level charts to learn more about the underlying detail data.

Wouldn't it be great if a user could simply click on one of the sections of the chart to bring up a detailed report for the data represented by that section? Wouldn't you know it? APEX makes this easy to do.

Try It Out: Create a Detail Report Your first step is to create the detailed report that will be called from the chart. As you remember, the chart you created from the interactive report in the last chapter showed the sum of purchases of different products. In this chapter, you will create a chart that will aggregate the value of purchases by product category. A detailed report would have information about the ORDER_ITEMS displayed, by category. You will have to link together multiple tables to get just the information you want, but with the help of the Query Builder, even this mildly complicated task is easy. Return to the main development area for your application, and click Create Page. Select the Report option, and click Next. On the next page, select Interactive Report, and click Next, or click on the icon directly. On the next page, set the Page Name to Orders and the Region Name to Order Report, and click Next. Change the Tab Options to Use Existing tab set and create a new tab and give the new tab the name of Purchases ...