Preface
IBM Cognos Report Studio is widely used for creating and managing business reports in medium to large-scale 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 to understand and use all the features provided by the new version of IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio to generate impressive deliverables. It will take you from being a beginner to a professional report author. It bridges the gap between the basic training provided by manuals or trainers and the practical techniques learned over years of practice.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Report Authoring Basic Concepts, introduces you to some fundamental components and features that you will be using in most of the reports. This is meant to bring all readers on the same page before moving on to advanced topics. It covers filters, sorting, aggregations, formatting and conditional formatting, and so on.
Chapter 2, Advanced Report Authoring, introduces you to the advanced techniques required to create more sophisticated report solutions that meet demanding business requirements. It covers cascaded prompts, master-detail queries, conditional blocks, defining drill links, and overriding the drill links. The most distinguishing recipe in this chapter is Writing back to the database.
Chapter 3, Using JavaScript Files – Tips and Tricks, explains how to manipulate the default selection, titles, visibility, and so on when the prompt page loads. It also explains how to add programmability like validating the prompt selection before submitting the values to the report engine. A favorite recipe in this chapter is Creating a variable width bar chart using JavaScript. The recipes in this chapter open a whole new avenue for you to progress on.
Chapter 4, The Report Page – Tips and Tricks, shows some techniques to break boundaries and provides some features in reports that are not readily available in the Studio. It also talks about showing images dynamically (traffic lights), handling missing images, dynamic links to external websites (for example, Google Maps), alternating drill links, showing tooltips on reports, minimum column width, and merged cells in Excel output.
Chapter 5, Working with XML, shows you how to edit the report outside the Studio by directly editing the XML specifications. The recipes in this chapter show you how to save time and quickly change references to old items, copy and paste the drill parameter mappings, and introduce you to important XML tags. The most intriguing recipe in this chapter is A hidden gem in XML – row level formatting.
Chapter 6, Writing Printable Reports, gives you tips and shows you the options available within the Studio to make the reports printable, as business reports need to be printed. This is often ignored during technical specification and development.
Chapter 7, Working with Dimensional Models, explains how when reports are written against a dimensional data source (or a dimensionally modeled relational schema), a whole new style of report writing is needed. You can use dimensional functions, slicers, and others. Also, filtering and zero suppression are done differently. This chapter talks about such options (as dimensional data sources are becoming popular again).
Chapter 8, Working with Macros, shows you that even though macros are often considered a framework modeler's tool, they can be used within Report Studio as well. These recipes will show you some very useful macros around security, string manipulation, and prompting.
Chapter 9, Using Report Studio Efficiently, shows you the Studio options and development practices to get the best out of Report Studio. It will include discussions about Studio options, setting time-outs, capturing the real query fired on a database, handling slow report validation, customizing classes, and so on.
Chapter 10, Working with Active Reports, introduces you to a new and powerful tool available in IBM Cognos 10 Report Studio called Active Reports. Active Reports allows you to create highly interactive and easy-to-use reports. You will learn some techniques that will change the way your reports look.
Chapter 11, Charts and New Chart Features, shows you how to use advanced features in charts available in IBM Cognos Report Studio. These features are based on the new charting engine that was introduced in IBM Cognos Version 10.
Chapter 12, More Useful Recipes, is an assorted platter of useful recipes, meant to show more workarounds, tricks, and techniques.
Chapter 13, Best Practices, shows you how to achieve code commenting, version controlling, regression testing, and so on. It will also show you some useful practices you should cultivate as standard during development.
Appendix, Recommendations and References, covers topics that are very useful for a Cognos report developer such as version controlling, Cognos mash-up service, and Cognos Go Office.
What you need for this book
IBM Cognos Report Studio 10 (10.1 to 10.2) or any later version.
Who this book is for
If you are a Business Intelligence or MIS Developer (programmer) working on Cognos Report Studio who wants to author impressive reports by putting to use what this tool has to offer, this book is for you. You could also be a Business Analyst or Power User who authors your own reports and who wants to look beyond the conventional features of Report Studio 10.
This book assumes that you can do basic report authoring, are aware of the Cognos architecture, and are familiar with Studio.
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In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive".
A block of code is set as follows:
<script>
function img2txt(img) {
txt = img.alt;
img.parentNode.innerHTML=txt;}
</script>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<script>
function img2txt(img) {
txt = img.alt;
img.parentNode.innerHTML=txt;}
</script>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Clicking on the Next button moves you to the next screen".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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