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

New conditional styling with v8.3 onwards


In this recipe, you will learn about the new conditional styles property introduced in Report Studio which, in my humble opinion, is the best feature added to make a report author's life less tedious.

Assume that the following report needs to be formatted such that quantities below 1.7M will be highlighted with red background and those above 2M should be green. Also, we need the negative values for Running Difference (month-on-month) to be shown in red and in a bracket.

As shown in previous recipe, this would have needed us to define two conditional variables. Then attach each to the corresponding column as 'Style variable' to define the styles. With one more such numeric column, the author had to define one more variable and repeat the exercise. Let's see how the new conditional styling feature solves this problem.

Getting ready

Write a new report similar to the one shown in the previous screenshot. Use Report Studio version 8.3 or later.

How to do it...