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

Adding conditional formatting


The business wants to see company sales figure by years and quarters. They want to highlight the entries where sales are below 5,000,000.

We will assume that database provides us the 'Quarter number' and we need to convert that to words. We will use conditional formatting for that. Also, where sales is below 5 million, the cell will be shown in red using another conditional variable.

Getting ready

Create a simple list report with Current year and Current quarter columns from the Sales | Time Dimension query subject.

Drag Quantity from Sales Fact.

Group by current year and sort by current quarter.

How to do it...

  1. Go to Condition Explorer and click on Variables.

  2. Drag a new string variable from Insertable Objects pane. Define the expression as: [Query1].[Current quarter].

  3. Change the name of variable to Convert_to_words.

  4. Add four values for the variable; the numbers 1 to 4.

  5. Now add a Boolean variable and define it as: [Query1].[Quantity]<5000000.

  6. Call this variable as Show_Red...