Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook

By : Abhishek Sanghani
Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook

By: Abhishek Sanghani

Overview of this book

Cognos Report Studio is widely used for creating and managing business reports in medium to large companies. It is simple enough for any business analyst, power user, or developer to pick up and start developing basic reports. However, when it comes to developing more sophisticated, fully functional business reports for wider audiences, report authors will need guidance. This book helps you understand and use all the features provided by Report Studio to generate impressive deliverables. It will take you from being a beginner to a professional report author. It bridges the gap between basic training provided by manuals or trainers and the practical techniques learned over years of practice. This book covers all the basic and advanced features of Report Authoring. It begins by bringing readers on the same platform and introducing the fundamental features useful across any level of reporting. Then it ascends to advanced techniques and tricks to overcome Studio limitations.Develop excellent reports using dimensional data sources by following best practices that development work requires in Report Studio. You will also learn about editing the report outside the Studio by directly editing the XML specifications. Provide richness to the user interface by adding JavaScript and HTML tags. The main focus is on the practical use of various powerful features that Report Studio has to offer to suit your business requirements.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Missing value versus zero value


Missing values in the data source can mean two things in real business—either the data is zero or it is missing. For example, in the case of a sales transaction based system, if there is no data for a product for a certain month, it means there was no sale of that product in that month. However, in some other system; for example, yearly returns of different stocks missing data might just mean that the data is not available for a certain reason. However, it certainly doesn't mean the return was zero.

Hence, it is important to clearly highlight the missing value as zero or missing in the report.

Getting ready

Create a simple crosstab report with all Product line on rows and Month key on columns from GO Data Warehouse (Query) | Sales. Choose sales quantity and unit cost as measures.

How to do it...

  1. First of all, we will run the report to see if there are any missing values.

    We can see that the Sales Quantity and Unit Price are missing for certain columns.

  2. Now go to...