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

Page structure view


This recipe will show you another view/option available in Cognos Report Studio to examine and edit the reports.

Getting ready

We will use the same report used in the last recipe for this.

How to do it...

  1. Open the report in Report Studio and go to the report page.

  2. From the menu, choose View | Page Structure.

  3. You will see the report page transforms into a tree-type list object.

  4. Open different nodes and examine the objects.

How it works...

As you know, the report definitions in Cognos Report Studio are nothing but XML files. The report objects, Page, List, Columns, and so on are all stored internally as nested tags.

By switching to Page Structure view, you can actually see how the objects are contained within each other and are inter-related. You can select any object (for example, List Columns Body Style) and manipulate its properties. You can also delete them, copy the objects and paste them in another place, and move them around within the rules governed by Cognos Report Studio...