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

Choosing output format from prompt


From all of the above recipes, you must have understood now that reports need to be generated in PDF format for printing purpose.

The default output format is HTML which is good for interactive reports with drill-down and drill-throughs. However, it is not printer friendly. They would see one page of output at a time with navigation links at the bottom of the screen, and hence printing the whole report is not straight-forward. For printing, users need to run the report in PDF format. Clicking on the PDF icon resubmits the report query and users have to wait for the execution to finish.

It will be handy to control the report output from prompt page. In this recipe, we will add a prompt control which asks users to specify the output format. This way, users can think of the application (interactive, printing, analysis, and so on) and decide whether the output should be HTML, PDF, Excel, or something else.

Getting ready

We will use the list report created in the...