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

Achieving minimum column width


A report shows sales quantity by product line and order method. The order methods are displayed as columns. When the crosstab is wider than the IE window, Cognos automatically shrinks the column width instead of showing the horizontal scrollbar.

Hence, you will notice that some columns are wider and some are narrower, depending on the data. For example, the Fax and Mail columns in the following screenshot are narrower than the Telephone column.

In this recipe, we will see a technique to achieve minimum column width for columns. When the crosstab is wider than the page width, the columns will not shrink more than a certain limit and a horizontal scroll bar will be provided automatically.

Getting ready

Create a crosstab report with product line on rows, order method on columns, and sales quantity as intersection.

Copy the invisible.gif supplied with this book to the Cognos server under {Cognos Installation}\webcontent\samples\images folder.

How to do it...

  1. Unlock the...