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

Showing images dynamically (Traffic Light report)


In first chapter, we created a report under the 'Running Difference' recipe. This report shows the month-on-month difference in sales quantity.

Business wants to give this report a 'dashboard' look by putting Traffic Light images (red, yellow, and green) in each row, based on whether there is rise in sales or fall.

Getting ready

We will use the "Running Difference: negative values in brackets and red" report based on the recipe in Chapter 2 for this.

Open that report in Cognos Report Studio and save a copy with a new name.

Tip

Please note that you will need administrator rights on the Cognos server to complete this recipe. If the server is installed on your personal machine, you will have these rights by default.

  1. For this recipe, we need to first create three icons or images for red, yellow, and green. They should be already available on the Cognos server under {Cognos Installation}\webcontent\samples\images folder. If not, then create them using...