Defining and Creating Navigation Paths

A navigation path is an ordered series of related dimension objects that are used for multi-dimensional analysis in Web Intelligence's drill mode. For example, a geographical navigation path could group together dimension objects such as Country, Region, and City.

Here is an example of a navigation path of the dimension objects, Country, Region, and City. At the highest level, the user sees a Country. At the next level down, the Country is broken down into more detail: the regions. At the next lower level, the regions are broken down into more detail: the towns. A user can analyze a measure object, such as Sales Revenue, against any of the levels in the navigation path.

A navigation path object can be one of two types:

• Default - The path is defined by the hierarchical organization of the dimension objects in the folder of business layer.
• Custom - The path is defined on any available dimensions.

Use the Navigation Paths tab in the business layer to identify valid default navigation paths and create custom paths. Any folder in the business layer that contains even one dimension object defaults to a navigation path. Obviously, a single-step "path" is not valuable to use for drilling into lower levels of detail. Consequently, SAP recommends that you identify those default navigation paths be identified as Custom navigation paths, even if the order of dimensions does not change. This simple drag-and-drop task will ensure that Web Intelligence users do not try to drill on an illogical path.

You can also edit those logical paths without altering the structure of the business layer folder. For example, end users may want to report on geographical Area but not drill to it. The folder can contain the Area dimensions, but it can be removed from the Navigation Path. Finally, you can create a true custom navigation path by arranging any available dimensions into a logical hierarchical path.