Clik here to view.
Secondary Cell Suppression on OLAP
I recently had the great pleasure of working with the Department of Health and Human Services in New Hampshire. They have employed a company called Abacus Service Corporation to develop a wonderful...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dynamic Time Groups in an OLAP Cube
One of the challenges presented to me while I was helping out at the DHHS in New Hampshire was to find a way to make user defined year groups in the report. While it’s trivial to create year groupings...
View ArticleQuickie: PDF Report in New Window
One of the biggest frustrations people have with Cognos is that it will use the same window to export a report to PDF. Excel will open a new page, but not PDF. Why? Who knows? (IBMers, please feel free...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Animated dropdown checkboxes and creating custom on-hover events
For those who missed it, PerformanceG2 is sponsoring my trip to the IOD this year. In return, I’ve written a couple of articles for their blog. The first is a fancy way of converting To This is a very...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Checking an “All” option in a checkbox prompt
One of my readers sent me an interesting problem. They need a checkbox prompt in which the top option is “All” and checking on any other option would automatically uncheck the “All” choice. Similarly,...
View Article#IBMIOD Monday
The last few days have been completely exhausting, and there are still three more days of the conference. As part of my deal with PerformanceG2, I’ll be posting more details of the conference on their...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Advanced Select and Search Prompts
This solution was built on 10.2.1.1, but should work on all versions after 10.2. Versions prior to 10.2 will need some rewriting as this is based on the Prompt API. One of the biggest complaints I get...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tab Solution That’s Easy to Maintain Without Code – Guest Post
“How corrupting boredom is, everyone recognizes also with regard to children. As long as children are having a good time, they are always good. This can be said in the strictest sense, for if they at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Creating a data entry page in Cognos
Cognos is a wonderful BI platform, but it does not handle write-backs to the database very well. By no means should Cognos be considered a data entry platform, but there are times when you may want to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Quick and painless way of accessing users’ folders
As part of my administrative duties for my various clients, I periodically trawl through the logs. Many times I’ll want to see exactly what the users are doing in the reports on my server. It becomes a...
View ArticleReview: IBM Cognos BI v10.2 Administration Essentials
Part of my job as an Admin is to understand all aspects of the Cognos environment, from configuring and tuning distributed systems to being able to decipher the cryptic error messages that occasionally...
View ArticleExport all report XMLs to file system – Updated
2 years ago, I posted a method for exporting all of the reports to the file system, using the same folder path. I was never happy with that method, as it required adding a UDF to the content store, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Passing parameters without refreshing the page
Recently a reader had an interesting problem. Her client needed a prompt page from which they could open different reports. As it stands now, the client needed to select their prompts, hit the finish...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Freezing headers in Cognos 10.2
Starting in Cognos 10.2, IBM released a way to freeze crosstab headers and rows. This method works in all major browsers, and doesn’t rely on dirty CSS hacks. To get it working, simply right-click on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Quickie: Resizing a value prompt list
Another problem from a reader. Unlike checkbox or radio prompts, list prompts don’t expand and collapse to fit the number of options available to them. In the above image, we have a prompt that has too...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Recent Java exploits and Cognos
Several new Java exploits have recently been uncovered. So far the all of the exploits that IBM has tested against their JDK and JREs have been unsuccessful. As my source in the upper echelons of IBM...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cognos Mashup Services – a brief example
In a previous post I showed how to embed Cognos reports in other applications or reports by using iframes. Unfortunately there are many problems with using iframes, difficulty interacting with objects...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Playing with MotioCI
A few posts back I gave a sneak peek of a new tool Motio was working on. Recently I was fortunate enough to get into the beta. The installation, for the most part, is fairly straight forward. You...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Button Prompts in Cognos 10
One of the features I’ve always wanted is buttons that set parameters. The existing prompt buttons just serve to provide navigation features to Cognos reports. You can’t, for instance, press the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Checkbox List Prompts revisited
A long while back, I published an article detailing how to use a list to interact with a checkbox prompt. Since then, several people have asked me to add features to the code, and to fix some bugs....
View Article