Book Image

IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager

By : Terence Phillip Curran
Book Image

IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager

By: Terence Phillip Curran

Overview of this book

"IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager" is a complete practical guide to using and getting the best out of this essential tool for modeling your data for use with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Reporting. With its step-by-step approach, this book is suitable for anyone from a beginner to an expert, complete with tips and tricks for better data modeling."IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager" is a step by step tutorial-based guide; from importing your data to designing and improving your model, and creating your packages while working with other modelers, every step is presented in a logical process.Learn how to use the best design strategy to design your model, create an import layer, a modeling layer, and a presentation layer to make your model easy to maintain. Do you need to design a DMR model? No problem, this book shows you every step. This book can even make working with other users easier - we will show you the methods and techniques for allowing others to work on the same model at the same time. Need to create dynamic data structures to change the way the data is presented to your users so your French users can see the data in French, your German users in German, and your English users in English? You can do all this with parameter maps."IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager" continues where the product manuals end, showing you how to build and refine your project through practical, step by step instructions.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating the business layer


The Framework Manager modeler can make the job of the report author easier by incorporating business information rules into the model. These business information rules can be as simple as renaming the columns in the imported tables to give them more intuitive names, or setting specific formatting for the imported columns. To assist the report authors, we can add standard prompts for type-in values, and standard filters, which can be reused in many different reports. We can also add calculations so that the report author does not need to add these calculations into their reports.

Renaming columns

This is perhaps the simplest task we can perform, and is often overlooked, but is perhaps the most useful thing the modeler can do. In most imported relational databases, the column names will be in all capitals, perhaps with underlines separating the various elements of the column names. These column names do not make it obvious what the data in the column is used for....