Cognos 10+ and access to create Drill-through Definitions

During a recent upgrade of Cognos 8.4.1 to Cognos 10.2.0 one of my developers noticed that he no longer had access to create Drill-through Definitions. The item in the menu was gone yet administrators still had access to it. I did a quick test and added him to the "Drill Through Assistant" capability with full permissions. After a log out and log in he had the Drill-through Definitions menu item again. So I started to do some digging. Turns out the functionality was changed but was never added to any of the Cognos 10 documentation up to and including 10.2.1.1.


Here is what the documentation states in the Admin and Security Guide. 10.2.0 Online Docs (lower down on the page).

Drill Through Assistant
This secured function controls access to the drill-through debugging functionality in the drill-through Go To page and the drill-through definitions. Users who have this capability see additional information in the Go To page for each drill-through target. This information can help to debug a drill-through definition, or can be forwarded to the Cognos Software Services representative.

There is no mention that this affects the "Drill-through Definitions" menu item. However my testing clearly showed that it did. Some more searching and I came across the following APAR (Bug report).

APAR PM01023
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1PM01023

In the APAR Conclusion it states:

In IBM Cognos software 10.1, the Drill-through definitions entry will not be displayed when the Drill Through Assistant capability is set to restricted access.

And now I (and you) know.