Tip of the Week - Dynamic URLs for Business Applications

Interactive data visualizations and dashboards help uncover and understand insights instantly. The dashboards created will be viewed and accessed by other organization members, so it's imperative for the dashboards and reports to be interactive.

This week's tip explains how to enhance interactivity in your business dashboards and reports using click-through URLs or dynamic URLs.

Click-through URLs for business application is a hyperlink that invokes a webpage and displays the unique records associated to your business application data.

Advantages of Click-through URLs

Help add supplemental information about the data to the reports and dashboards that are created.
Help the other organization members who access the reports to view the records related to it.

A few places where you can use Click-through URLs:

Marketing: While analyzing marketing campaigns and blog post performances.
IT and help desk: While analyzing ticket trends, and support team performance, you can view the entire ticket thread using dynamic URLs.
E-commerce: To view the purchase history of each customer and the abandoned checkouts.
Sales: To view the leads and deals status and to view the sales person performance.
Project Management: While analyzing Milestones, Tasks and Bugs data, you can view the related information using dynamic URLs.

Creating Dynamic URLs

Each module in the business application has a unique ID. You can construct dynamic URLs by adding a formula column using the column ID and the Concat function.

Follow the below steps to construct a dynamic URL:

Login in to your business application and open the module for which you intend to construct a dynamic URL.
Open any record in the module to copy the URL. Since the ID will differ for each record, copy the URL excluding the ID. The below image highlights the URL that is copied for the Deals table in Zoho CRM.
Open the corresponding table in Zoho Analytics. Click Add and select Formula Column from the drop-down menu.
Specify the Formula Column Name.
In the Formula field, click Functions and choose the concat function.
Enter the elements to be joined (the copied URL and the column ID) like shown in the image.

Formula: concat('module URL', to_string("Id")

Example: concat('https://crm.zoho.com/crm/zylkerincx/tab/Potentials/', to_string("Id"))
Click Save.
The formula column will be created and the data type of the column will be marked as Text. Right-click the column, and select Change Data Type. Select URL from the drop-down menu. Then click OK.

The below image shows the Deals Summary report that has a dynamic URL that links to the Zoho CRM application.

Alternate Text for URL column

You can also set an Alternate Text value for the URL column if needed. To do this, right-click the column and select Format Column from the drop-down menu.
In the Format Column dialog box that opens, click the Display As drop-down menu and select Alternate text.
In the Alternate Text field, enter the text that should be displayed as URL.
Click OK.