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

Introduction


Report Studio is a web-based tool and the reports designed in Cognos Report Studio are accessed through a web browser. This allows us to do certain web page specific things; for example, embedding our own HTML code or JavaScripts.

Often, business users need certain functionality which is not naturally available in Cognos Report Studio. Hence, a new area has evolved over the period in the Cognos Report Studio developer's world—that is Javascripting.

With JavaScript, we can do certain manipulations on the objects used for prompt pages. Please note that this was not officially introduced in initial Cognos documentation. However, lately many such techniques were published on the Cognos website itself.

In this chapter, we will see some recipes that will teach you very useful and commonly required functionalities achieved using JavaScripts. All these recipes are valid for Cognos versions 8.3 and 8.4. These versions are quite recent and most organisations will be moving on to 8.3/8.4...