Overview of Report Links

Report links enable single-step access to a report or web page that is related to a report that you are currently viewing. For example, you might be looking at a bar chart that has sales information for each geographical region of your company. If you click the bar for the Northeast region, then a report link associated with the graph could take you to a different report that provides information about employees in each region. You can click in the top left corner of a destination report to return to the previous report.

Using SAS Visual Analytics Designer (the designer), you can add a link from a report object to another report, to a specific section or an info window in the current report, or to an external URL. If a destination report contains multiple sections, then you are able (when defining the link) to choose the initial section of the destination report that you want to open first.

When a report has an info window, you can provide additional information to a user who is viewing the report. For example, you might want a list table to provide additional information for a bar chart, or you might want to provide additional text about what is displayed in the data for a particular report object. In the SAS Visual Analytics Viewer (the viewer), a user double-clicks the data (for example, a bar, a bubble, a pie slice, a table row, and so on) in a report object that has an info window, and then the additional information is displayed in a new window in the viewer. For more information, see Overview of Report Sections and Info Windows.

Linking has elements of both a filter and an interaction. A report section that is the target of a link is filtered by the values that are selected in the linked report object. And, like interactions, objects that display detail data cannot be the source of a link.

Imported box plots and heat maps with a relational category measure and imported forecast plots can be the source of section, report, or external links.

Starting in the 7.4 release, you can synchronize prompt values and parameters across linked reports. For example, suppose that you have two reports, Report 1 and Report 2. When you follow a link from Report 1 to Report 2, all of the prompts and their values are displayed in Report 2, and their states are synchronized. The same is true when you move from Report 2 to Report 1.