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

Automatic selection and submission of values


A business report has numerous prompts on the prompt page. Often, users want to run a report for the latest month in the database, 'Camping Equipment' product and 'E-mail' as a order method.

They want a facility to either manually select vales for these prompts; or alternatively, run the report for the above selections on single button click.

In this recipe, we will add a custom button on prompt page that will allow users to quickly run the report for frequently used selections.

Getting ready

Create a list report with product line, order method, and sales quantity as columns.

Create optional filters on product line, order method, and Shipment Month that is, Month Key (Shipment Date).

Create a prompt page with three value prompts for these filters.

How to do it...

  1. We will start by wrapping the prompts within spans, so that they can be captured easily in JavaScript. Add one HTML tag before and one after each prompt to define Spans. Define the spans as...