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

Handling missing image issue


In the previous recipe, we saw how to add images to the report. You will be using that technique in many cases, some involving hundreds of images (For example, Product Catalogue).

There will often be a case in which database has a URL or image name, whereas the corresponding image is either missing or inaccessible. In such a case, the web browser shows an error symbol. This looks quite ugly and needs to be handled properly.

In this recipe, we will see how to handle this problem gracefully.

Getting ready

We will use the report prepared in previous recipe. We need to delete the Green.jpg file (or rename it to something else) from the server, in order to create the missing image scenario.

How to do it...

  1. In the previous recipe, we added an image object and defined its conditional URLs. We need to replace that image with an HTML Item. For that, unlock the report objects and delete the image component. Add an HTML Item in the same column.
  2. Select this HTML item and from...