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

Caution about HTML items and JavaScript


This recipe shows you that the HTML items and JavaScripts used on the report page are not executed when report runs in PDF or Excel.

Getting ready

Open the report that we created in Chapter 3, "Generating bar chart with JavaScript" recipe.

How to do it...

  1. Run the report in HTML format. Ensure that the bar charts are generated fine.

  2. Now re-run the report in PDF format.

  3. Notice that bar charts are absent from the PDF output.

How it works...

When users run the report in any format other than HTML, the prompt page generated is still a web page. Hence, any scripts put on the prompt page (for example, default selections) work fine. However, when the actual report is generated, it will execute the scripts only in HTML format.

Hence, the script actions fail in case of PDF, Excel, or any other non-HTML output.