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

Creating templates


In all organizations, the reporting suite is required to follow the standard formatting. Similar to other tools and technologies, Cognos Report Studio also allows you to create and use templates in order to maintain the standards, reduce cosmetic errors, and save time.

Getting ready

We will amend the report created in the previous recipe for this.

How to do it...

  1. We have already defined the formatting for crosstab members and hyperlinks. Now go ahead and define standard report header and footer. You might want to put the company logo in the header.

  2. From the menu, Choose File | Convert to Template.

    Notice that the Model/Source pane becomes empty and all data items are removed from the report.

  3. From the menu, choose File | Save As. Give the filename as Template. Notice that the icon created for this is different than other reports.
  4. Now we will prepare the XML specification of this template to be inserted in the server files. For that, select Tools | Copy Report to Clipboard from...