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

Conditional column titles


This recipe is meant to introduce you to the Text source variable property.

There is a crosstab report that shows sales quantity by order method (rows) and months (columns). We need to conditionally show full month names or short names depending on user's selection on the prompt page.

Getting ready

Create a crosstab report with Order Method | Order Method on rows, Time (ship Date) | Month (Ship Date) on columns and Sales fact | Quantity in the intersection.

Create a value prompt on the prompt page with following specification:

  • Static choices: Full name, Short name

  • Parameter name: choice

  • User Interface (UI): Radio button group

How to do it...

  1. Go to Conditional Explorer and create a Boolean variable. Call it as Is_FullName and define it as: ParamDisplayValue('choice') = 'Full Name'.

  2. Now go to the report page and select <Month> from column titles. Set its Text Source variable to Is_FullName.

  3. From Conditional Explorer, choose Yes condition for the variable. This will allow...