I have been working with Ido Millet of Millet software to enhance one of the features in the DataLink Viewer.  One of my favorite DLV features is that it allows you to change the value of a formula at runtime with a click.  This allows the user to change a group, a sort, or do “in place drill down” where you can expand and collapse the details of a group.  But I needed to tweak this so that I could change the value in a target formula based on the name of the clicked formula. The clicked formula name becomes an input available in the calculation of the target formula.

Here is how I used it. My customers report was grouped by category, and each group footer had a row of 31 subtotals.  These subtotals represented each day of the month.  It looked a bit like a cross-tab.  The problem was that a drill-down on any of the 31 values in the row would expose all the details for the category. What we wanted was to allow the user to click on any of the 31 subtotals and see the details for just that day within the category.  I have done this before using 31 on-demand subreports, but the size of the report made this much too slow. With the new DLV feature I can change the target formula based on the name of the clicked formula. The target formula is then used to control which drill down rows are visible or suppressed.  I can now get 31 different drill-downs from the same group footer.

While this was perfect for my needs, Ido took the idea one step further and allowed the click to generate a printable HTML ToolTip. This is a bit different than what I described above but I can see it having several uses.  This is easier to understand if you see it so Ido has posted a video demo.