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

A hidden gem in XML—row level formatting


As you know now, a Cognos Report is an XML definition. When you create or update a report in Report Studio, the corresponding XML tags are added to or modified in the report specification. However, it is possible to directly add or modify XML tags that are not visible from the studio as an object or property.

In this recipe, we will see how to define crosstab row level formatting in the XML to save the development and maintenance time.

There is a crosstab report with many measures on columns. The business wants to highlight the rows which belong to costly products (>25 units). Instead of defining conditional formatting for every column, we will modify the XML here to directly define row level formatting.

Getting ready

Create a report with product name on rows and various measures on columns, shown as follows:

How to do it...

  1. Define a conditional variable of Boolean type to identify costly products (which are to be highlighted in the report).

    Call this...