Forum Discussion
Drill-through Not Working Between Pages Using Different Data Sources in Power BI
Thanks to johnbasha33 for always helping the community!
The drill-through doesn’t work because Power BI requires the same exact field from the same table (not just identical columns) to pass filter context between pages.
- Simple Fix:
Use the combined UNION ALL table as the main table for both report pages. Then, use that table’s fields (like CustomerID, etc.) for both the visuals and the drill-through target field.
Only fields from the same table can be used in drill-through — even if column names are identical across tables.
Hope this helps! If yes, please give kudos and accept as solution.
- Simple Fix:
Hi BhavaniK , Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Community Forum.
You've made good progress by creating a UNION ALL view and adding a source_table column, that’s exactly the right direction. As johnbasha33 and Ilgar_Zarbali rightly pointed out, though, Power BI requires that drill-through fields come from the same exact table, not just from tables with matching columns. Even small inconsistencies in data lineage will break the drill-through.
Most likely, your current setup still references TableA or TableB in some visuals or filters. To fix this, make sure every visual, slicer and the drill-through filter on both pages uses fields only from the combined table. Then, apply a filter like source_table = "A" on the main page and source_table = "B" on the drill-through page to isolate the relevant data, all while keeping everything within the same table structure. This ensures the filter context passes cleanly when a user drills through.