Introduction

This chapter will introduce you to an interesting and useful tool of Cognos BI, called 'macros'. They can be used in Framework Manager as well as Report Studio. In this book, we are not covering Framework Manager, hence I will restrict myself to the use of macros in Report Studio.

The Cognos engine understands the presence of a macro as it is written within a pair of hashes (#). It executes the macros first and puts the result back into report specification like a literal string replacement. We can use this to alter data items, filters, and slicers at run time.

You won't find the macro functions and their details within Report Studio environment (which is strange, as it fully supports them). Anyways, you can always open Framework Manager and check different macro functions and their syntaxes from there. Also, there is documentation available in Cognos' help and online materials.

We have already seen one example of macros in Chapter 7, Working with Dimensional Model (in the "Swapping...