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

Swapping dimensions using string manipulation


When a prompt is based on a dimension, the selected value is passed as a full qualifier (Member Unique Name), not just the key. This results in limitation of the prompt use. We cannot use the prompt to filter any other dimension.

In this recipe, we will see how to over-ride this limitation by doing the string manipulation of MUN.

Consider a business case where the cube has two time dimensions (say Billing date and Transaction date). Users want a choice on prompt page to select which time dimension to filter on. Also, they will select a Date (Year or Month) on the prompt page, and we need to filter the appropriate time dimension.

Getting ready

I added a role playing dimension to the GO Sales cube for this. This is called 'Transaction Time Month'. Ideally, it should join to the fact based on a different key than the pre-existing 'Time Month Dim'. However, this being just for illustration, I have used the same key.

You can download this cube from the...