Business Intelligence, Analytics and Cognos

I have been meaning to write about my experiences and learning of writing Cognos Reports (version 8.4) over TM1 cube since long. Finally got around doing it today. In coming days, I will keep on adding new points that I learn and are worth mentioning. The most irritating and strange behaviour we saw during this development is – many standard OLAP reporting features of Cognos stop working after you put rules in the TM1 cube. These features are: 1. Automatic Aggregation: All the measure with aggregation set to automatic stop working and you have to define the aggregation function. i.e. Total in most cases. 2. Slicer and Row Member sharing: Often you put many slicers in query each based on a prompt. So you might have slicers on Dates, Products, Location, Currency, Scaling, etc. These will be standard in all reports with standard prompts and irrespective of what dimensions you have in crosstab report. However, after putting rules in TM1 cube, if we have a dimension in rows or columns (sa...

Some times we create seperate reports but later on require to copy them all into one to make a report pack. Though Report Studio is very good in allowing us copy paste individual objects across, you need to be very cautious otherwise you will end up spending hours in fixing errors. In my understanding, if you follow below steps, you will be fine. 1. Open the first report in studio that you would like to copy in the pack. 2. First of copy all required Query Subjects across to destination by going in query explorer. 3. Then copy the conditional variables across to destination report. 4. Now we need to copy the Conditional Styles across but unfortunately it is not direct copy-paste operation. Hence, you will need to open both source and destination reports' XML specification in an editor. Then locate the Conditional Style tags from source report (they are usually towards the end of specification) and copy them to destination reports. 5. Now bring the modified specification back in re...

It's a common question amongst the developers - how to change package of multiple reports in one go! Unfortunately, Cognos doesn't have any built-in facility to do this at the moment. However, there are some work-around for this. 1. Use third party tools: Some private tools hook-up to Cognos Content Store and allow you editing multiple reports simultaneously. This includes changing the report package, access permissions, visibility, etc. 2. DIY: In this simple Do It Yourself method of doing bulk update on reports, I place all the reports in one folder. Then generate deployment archive of the folder using Export wizard. This pushes all the report definitions in one xml file. Pick up the deployment archive, unzip and examine the xmls. Once you find the xml that contains all the reports, open it in a good xml editor. Now, search for the package name and identify the pattern you need to replace. Now, simply replace all the instances of package name using that pattern, put the fil...