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

RoleValue() function


This recipe will show you a useful function which you will often need while working with dimensional and dimensionally-modeled-relational models.

As the purpose of this recipe is only to examine this function, we won't consider any specific business case here.

Getting ready

Create a new list type of report based on the same GO Sales SSAS Cube package.

How to do it...

  1. From Insertable Objects, locate Organization Code2.

  2. Drag it on the list as a new column.

  3. Now add a new data item to the list. Define it as: roleValue('_businessKey',[Organization Code2]).

  4. Add two more data items and define them as follows:

    roleValue('_memberCaption',[Organization Code2])
    roleValue('_memberUniqueName',[Organization Code2])
  5. Run the report to test it.

How it works...

When defining a DMR (Dimensionally Modeled Relational) model in Framework Manager, the modeler can define various columns as attributes. This roleValue() function allows you to access these attributes.

This function takes two arguments: Role...