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

Introduction


This chapter will show some advanced techniques that involve changing the XML specification of a report outside of Report Studio. This is a common practice amongst experienced report writers. It often saves a lot of time and also provides some functionality that is not available in Report Studio.

You should preferably have an XML editor application for this. I have used Visual Studio for this. The advantages of using an XML editor are visual aids to help XML editing, automatic tag completion, tree like expand-collapse functionality, and easy search and replace. However, if you don't have one, you can also use any generic text editor for these recipes, for example, Textpad or Notepad.

If you don't know anything about XML at all, it would be worth reading about it on the Internet. There are websites like www.xmlfiles.com and www.w3schools.com/xml that are good for basic understanding and practice. After reading about XML and following the recipes step-by-step, you will not only...