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

Code comments


All applications need some kind of code commenting mechanism for maintenance purposes. With programming languages it is easier; however with tools it can be a little tricky to put comments. In this recipe, we will see different options around putting comments within a report that will be invisible from users but accessible to the developers.

Getting ready

Open any existing report in Cognos Report Studio.

How to do it...

  1. For the first technique to put comments and notes within a report and hide it from users, go to Page Explorer and create a new page. Call it Comments.

  2. Open this new page and drag text items on it. Write all the comments about report here (description, functionality, notes, special cases, and so on).

  3. Now go to Condition Explorer and create a new Boolean variable. Define the expression as: 1=0. Name this variable as Render_Comments.

  4. Go to Comments page. Open the Render Variable property and connect it to Render_Comments variable.

  5. Run the report. Notice that Comments page...