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

Writing back to the database


This is perhaps the most frequently requested functionality by business users—writing some notes or comments back to database, for a particular entry on the report. Though there is no direct functionality provided in Cognos Report Studio for this, it is still possible to achieve it by putting together multiple tools. This recipe will show you how to do that.

The business wants to see sales figures by products. They want to then write some comments for the products from the same interface. The comments need to be stored in database for future retrieval and updating.

You would need access on the backend database and Framework Manager for this recipe.

Tip

As we are only concentrating on Report Studio in this book, we will not cover the Framework Manager options in depth. The power users and Report Studio developers need not be masters in Framework Modelling, but they are expected to have sufficient knowledge of how it works. There is often a Framework Manager Specialist...