Administration Console showing raw format web page

[TomCognos]

Hi All.
Long time lurker first time poster.

This is not a request of solving an issue. This is a heads up to solve a very particular issue

Anyone who has upgraded to Cognos 11 Analytics and entered into the Administration Console only to see a unformatted web page missing icons (replaced by a cross) etc. Then this is the fix for you.

Turns out in Cognos 10 if you set a skin under my preferences as a custom skin, then the upgrade occurs and the skin is removed or deleted or not carried forward. Then the above problem occurs. If you create a new AD account and log into admin with that new account the problem goes away, but then so does all of your access emails etc.

So within Administration Console in the top right there is a little person icon (or on the un-formatted screen its the first cross next to the circular refesh button). Click or double click that. Now on the un-formatted screen down the bottom of the screen you will see a my preferences. Again click or double click.

You will now see the my preferences tab. Change the "Style" to Corporate and you will have a fully formatted admin screen back. This was identified though clicking F12 and seeing the skin reference in the first 10 lines of code referring to an old skin.

Hope this helps some one else because it took a while to fix here.
 

[dougp]

I've seen this.  What you're seeing is related to content (images and css files) not being found.
I assume there's more than one person who has selected the custom skin as their default.

Here's a good solution.

Here I assuming your custom skin is named MyCustomSkin, which doesn't exist on the Cognos Analytics server.

On the Cognos Analytics server...
Copy <install_location>\webcontent\skins\corporate to <install_location>\webcontent\skins\MyCustomSkin.
Copy <install_location>\webcontent\bi\skins\corporate to <install_location>\webcontent\bi\skins\MyCustomSkin.

No restart is required.  Once these are in place, the browser will find the styles and images and Cognos Analytics will be functional and more aesthetically pleasing.

[Kiran P]

Or simply follow the same process you would do for skins while upgrading earlier versions I.e copy skins to respective folder and update system.xml. It works the same way as any earlier version.

Thanks
Kiran

[dougp]

...except that <install_location>\webcontent\bi\ doesn't exist in earlier versions.