A hidden gem in XML—row level formatting
As you know now, a Cognos Report is an XML definition. When you create or update a report in Report Studio, the corresponding XML tags are added to or modified in the report specification. However, it is possible to directly add or modify XML tags that are not visible from the studio as an object or property.
In this recipe, we will see how to define crosstab row level formatting in the XML to save the development and maintenance time.
There is a crosstab report with many measures on columns. The business wants to highlight the rows which belong to costly products (>25 units). Instead of defining conditional formatting for every column, we will modify the XML here to directly define row level formatting.
Getting ready
Create a report with product name on rows and various measures on columns, shown as follows:
How to do it...
Define a conditional variable of Boolean type to identify costly products (which are to be highlighted in the report).
Call this...
