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

Creating nested report: Defining master detail relationship


Users want to see product lines, products, and corresponding unit costs. For every product, they also want to see the trend of sales over last year.

We need to produce a list report with required information and nest a line chart within it to show the sales trend.

Getting ready

Create a simple list report based on the Sales (query) namespace. Pull Product | Product line, Product | Product name and Sales fact | Unit cost in the list.

How to do it...

  1. We already have a list report that shows the product lines, products, and corresponding unit costs. Please make sure that appropriate sorting and aggregations are applied to the columns.

  2. Now we will add a nested Chart object to show the sales trend for each product.

  3. Drag a new Chart object from the Insertable Objects pane onto the report as a column.

  4. Choose an appropriate chart type. In this recipe, we will choose "Line with Markers".

  5. From Source pane, drag Quantity from Sales fact onto the chart...