Book Image

IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

IBM 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, this book is designed to take the reader beyond the basics and into the world of creating more sophisticated, functional business reports.IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio Cookbook, Second Edition 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.Written in a recipe style, this book offers step-by-step instructions for IBM Cognos Report Studio users to author reports effectively, allowing a reader to dip in and out of the chapters as they desire. You will see a new fictional business case in each recipe that will relate to a real-life problem and then you will learn how to crack it in Report Studio. This book covers all the basic and advanced features of Report Authoring. It introduces 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. You will discover how to build and use Cognos Active Reports, a new addition in IBM Cognos 10. Provide richness to the user interface by adding JavaScript and HTML tags and using the different chart types introduced in IBM Cognos 10. The main focus is on the practical use of various powerful features that Report Studio has to offer to suit your business requirements. Learn numerous techniques and hacks that will allow you to make the best out of your IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Sorting grouped values


The output of the previous recipe brings the right information back on the screen. It filters the rows correctly and shows the highest selling product per product line for the selected shipment month.

For better representation and to highlight the best-selling product lines, we need to sort the product lines in descending order of quantity.

Getting ready

Open the report created in the previous recipe in Cognos Report Studio for further amendments.

How to do it...

In the report created in the previous recipe, we managed to show data filtered by the shipment month. To improve the reports look and feel, we will sort the output to highlight the best-selling products. To start this, perform the following steps:

  1. Open the report in Cognos Report Studio.

  2. Select the Quantity column.

  3. Click on the Sort button from the toolbar and choose Sort Descending.

  4. Run the report to check if sorting is working. You will notice that sorting is not working.

  5. Now go back to Report Studio, select Quantity, and click on the Sort button again. This time choose Edit Layout Sorting under the Other Sort Options header.

  6. Expand the tree for Product line. Drag Quantity from Detail Sort List to Sort List under Product line as shown in the following screenshot:

  7. Click on the OK button and test the report. This time the rows are sorted in descending order of Quantity as required.

How it works...

The sort option by default works at the detailed level. This means the non-grouped items are sorted by the specified criteria within their own groups.

Here we want to sort the product lines that are grouped (not the detailed items). In order to sort the groups, we need to define a more advanced sorting using the Edit Layout Sorting options shown in this recipe.

There's more...

You can also define sorting for the whole list report from the Edit Layout Sorting dialog box. You can use different items and ordering for different groups and details.

You can also choose to sort certain groups by the data items that are not shown in the report. You need to bring only those items from source (model) to the query, and you will be able to pick it in the sorting dialog.