Monday, March 22, 2010

COGNOS 8 – Page Break on a Query


We created a report called Patient Statement. This report is actually a form that is set by the state as a standard, the specialty of this report is that; we need to design it in such a way that report the client should be able to print the report and post it directly through an envelope.
Let me explain it better. The form is designed such that when we will fold the report into 3 part, the address of the patient comes exactly @ the address area of the envelope. So the end-user, runs the report, prints it out and folds it into the envelope and it should be ready to post. (Basically reduce the labour work of finding the patients address and writing / typing it on the envelope each time). The other issue was the total for each page that should be at the bottom of the A4 page even though the number of claims or payments in the report varies. So we had to format the length of the page also.
We also needed to have only 1 patient per page. So in order to make this simple Page Break on the report, here are some steps to follow.
1. Create the list or crosstab
2. Go to the page explorer, and drag the ‘Page Set’ under the Page1.
3. Drag the Page1 under the Detail Pages (Under the Page Set1)
4. Drag the query item you want to page break on. Here in the above screen shot, you can see that I have tried to Page Break on Patient. I could have used only the Patient ID, but I was just playing around with the options. By adding multiple levels under the ‘Page Set’, we can actually break the page depending on all the condition we want to.
Such a simple but very useful option.
Look at the screen shot above to understand it better.

Monday, March 8, 2010

COGNOS 8.3 / 8.4 Report refresh issue / Data not refreshing on the report – Issue



Being in a healthcare field, there are humongous data that has to be worked on with loads of junk data also involving in it. There are some reports that a facility has to submit to the state for grants. So during this, the client does loads of testing on the reports that we generate. During this testing phase, the testers depend on particular dates for the data to verify and they run it so many times that the IE or the Cache memory in COGNOS does not refresh sometimes. So to beat this refresh problem all we need to do is:
File name: CQEConfig.xml.sample
File Location: c8\configuration
Changes to make: Open the file in a notepad, look for queryReuse and set the value = 0 from 5 at both the places.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

COGNOS 8.3 Framwork Start Issue & Auto Sum feature on the metadata




First Image – Error -- > ‘Unable to access service URL’
The first thing one should check when this error pop’s up is the configuration file. We need to set the ‘Gateway URI’ to the ‘http://localhost:9300/p2pd/servlet/dispatch’ or copy paste the URL from ‘Disptacher URI for Gateway’ and restart the COGNOS services.
The other instance where I came across the same issue was when one of my friend installed Framework on an existing COGNOS instance. Usually what happens is that, when we install something new; we need to restart COGNOS. Especially when we install a framework, COGNOS automatically turn the configuration down and throws the above error when we try to open a new project.

Second Image – The auto sum feature in the query testing screen. Whenever we create a metadata we need to make sure we test the metadata with the auto sum checked, because the result set vary when the auto sum is checked from the unchecked result. The result that we get from the auto sum checked is the result that we should expect from the reports created on report studio. The auto sum I guess actually runs the report depending on the property of the each metadata like whether they are measure, attribute or anything else. But without the auto sum I think they are run individually.
Will post again on this topic.