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 user name in footer


Let's examine two more session parameters which are very useful in real-life reports. Reports are often printed and handed over to other members/teams to have a look. For a person who is looking at a printed report, the most important thing is to know the time when the report was run. That is why we usually put the timestamp in the report footer.

However, it is useful to record who ran the report. This helps us to go back to the person in case of any queries. This recipe shows you how to display the user's name and the machine on which report was run in the footer.

Getting ready

Pick up any of the existing reports.

How to do it...

  1. Go to Query Explorer and create a new query subject called User.

  2. In that query subject, add a new data item. Call it Machine and define it as: #sq($machine)#

  3. Then add another data item and call it as User. Define it as: #sq($account.defaultName)#

  4. Now go to the report page. Select anything on the page. Using ancestor button, select the whole...