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Dynamic links to external websites (Google Map example)
By Abhishek Sanghani, Author of IBM Cognos 8 Report Studio Cookbook
In this recipe, we will introduce you to the 'Hyperlink' component. A report shows retailers information by products. It shows various fields like Retailer name, Contact information, City, and Postal zone. Business wants to have a link to Google maps that will show retailer's place on the map using the Postal zone information. As the addresses might change in the backend, the technique needs to be dynamic to pick up the latest postal zone. Getting ready Create a simple list report that shows Retailers information by Product lines. How to do it... - From the 'Insertable Objects' toolbox, drag a hyperlink object onto the report as a new column.
- Change its Text property to Map. Set the URL Source Type to Report Expression and define the report expression as follows: 'http://maps.google.com/maps?q=' + [Query1].[City]
- Run the report to test it.
As you can see, there is a link for each retailer record. If you Shift+click on the link, it will open the Google map for corresponding postal zone in a new window. How it works... Here we are using the 'Hyperlink' component of CRS. We can define the URL as any static link. However... Read More The Issue of User Adoption By Dustin Adkison, BrightStar Partners, Solution Specialist 3/29/2010 Adapting a new technology is really quite simple… until the users get involved. If only we could build out our perfect Cognos environment like the one that we see in all of the demos and magically all of the users would flock to it. Unfortunately, in reality, user adoption is never that simple. Unlike technology, there is no manual or guide to user adoption. Most of us work in an environment where IT and business are quite separate. In these types of environments, there is a huge disconnect. This can manifest itself as simple issues like, “Who pays for this technology?” Or more complex like, “Who owns this technology and is responsible for its success?” This article will address practical ways for an IT group implementing Cognos to increase user adoption and gain business buy-in. Read More Running Cognos Reports with URL's and Achieving Cool Results By Dave Munson, BSP Software, Sr. Developer 2/15/2010 Running a report by calling a URL is more useful than you might think. Discover a little known feature of Cognos that gives you a simple way to integrate with other applications or extend the capabilities of your reports. Learn how to create a custom master/detail report using 2 separate reports. Use this technique to minimize database impact and allow easy access to contextual detail data when the performance impact of a traditional master/detail report could prohibit it while giving your users more flexibility and better insight by embedding a fully functional report, including drill-through and additional prompting, right inside their summary reports. Allow them to drill down and analyze detail data without ever leaving or re-executing the summary data queries. Read More The Model Development Process - Cognos Planning Provided by Packt Publishing (www.packtpub.com ) 1/12/2010 The Model Development Process is a proven step-by-step approach for designing and deploying planning models in an organization. This process enables us to chart various activities involved in identifying the organization's planning requirements in order to devise functional and efficient modelling solutions. The following diagram illustrates the Model Development Process, and shows the typical stakeholders and IBM Cognos tools involved in the process: Read More Enabling Caching in Cognos 8 By Avdhesh Singh, BrightStar Partners, Consultant 10/12/2009 You can enable caching option in Cognos 8 to gain performance depending on your user requirement. Caching options can be set in three places: - Report Studio Query
- Framework Manager governors
- Global cache
Read More Size Limit of Framework Manager By Avdhesh Singh, BrightStar Partners, Consultant 6/29/2009 Contrary to popular belief, there is no size limit for a Framework Manager model or package. The model file is stored on the hard disk, and the file could be as large as available on the hard disk. With that being said, there could be some problems in report authoring if the package size is extremely large. For example... Read More Setting up security in Cognos 8.3 Transformer cubes using Active Directory By S.J. Van Jaarsveld, BrightStar Partners, Consultant 5/26/2009 The following steps provide a summary for setting up security in Cognos 8.3 Transformer cubes using Active Directory. It also lists a few pitfalls to be aware of.
Steps: Read More DATA MANAGER FACT BUILD DELIVERY METHODS By Greg Jungels, BrightStar Partners, Consultant 5/12/2009 When using SQL Server 2005/2008 as your target for a Data Warehouse, there is a new Fact Delivery method available that provides increased performance: "SQL Server Bulk Copy via API Delivery." This new Delivery method uses the SQL Server 2005/2008 supplied API for bulk copying of records.
The drawback of using this delivery method is... Read More |
