bringing tree structure into report studio IBM COGNOS (Writing positive and creative stuff)

  

When I started writing my professional blog my mindset was to write all the issues that I come across, especially to help out newbies out there. Most of the blogs that I have written so far are issue oriented and very few blogs where I have written some creative stuff. Off late, the issues that I come across seems to be very silly and I don't get enough critical issues to write on the blog.

Anyways, I have been googling a lot on new ideas that are running in my mind, things like COGNOS to new ways of presentations to gaming and apps. It has been crazy but there is so much stuff available out there.

Just created a report that will show the hierarchy levels on a data in a tree format. (the image explains better) assume you want to look at the revenue of the entire organization (USA) and specifically look at each sub level regions to see where you might have the best and worst revenue generated.  (more like conditional blocking.... A simple red for below avg and green for above avg) This tree structure helps you to drill down and drill up at any level and all the blue cubes show the path of drill down.

This kind of report can be created on relational database / report studio 8.3 / simple lists / some conditional blocking. Email me if you want to implement this.Been lazy to replicate it on sample data and upload the XML. Will do it in future.

Tight Integration of IBM COGNOS within an application

The basic idea is to bring the reports to the user and not asking the user to go the reports .  Integrating BI into your application always help. The project had few things:

End users don't have to go to a different location to run their reports.  
Tighter integration for security
Utilization of the BI GUI
P.S - No SDK required

Let me put down an example / scenario

You have a portal where business users login. Here, you want them to view few specific reports that can alert them. In my case the front end of the application is java and I am familiar with simple java coding. What we did here is, using iFrames we pass the URL of the report with the prompt values ( for security reasons). So as soon as this link is clicked, it runs the cognos report. we have given a small window size of 400 by 400 for the cognos viewer and have designed the reports accordingly. Believe me, it has come out beautifully and the performance is amazing as the framework was designed based on these particular reports. Only disadvantage here, the end user cannot open anything but just watch the cognos viewer. No print options, no email, no output formatting etc. Advantages , it's lighting speed, security, GUI.

I have tried to put a rough sketch of how it looks. The red section is where you will see the cognos viewer.  Each individual box here is a separate report and not 1 single dashboard. This way the user can drill down on individual report without affecting the other. 

Making things easier – IBM COGNOS 10

I have worked on 8.3 /8.4 versions of COGNOS extensively. We have started work on IBM COGNOS 10 and I realize that they have got in some really good tools in the report studio. Especially the tab control option that I want to mention today.

In 2009 we had designed a report that would work more like a tool than a simple report. So I used java scripting and iframe to make that report work. An end user would not know if it was a tool or a COGNOS report. I spent considerable amount of time (2 weeks) to design the layouts and colors.

The image here, which has ‘Sandeep’ as tabs was created on report studio 8.3; with each tab giving you access to a different domain of the canned reports. Now, we have the same concept in IBM COGNOS 10 as Tab Control and it is so simplified ---Just drag and drop. I am so glad that this feature has been added but also envy because of the ease of availability to all now :).

Anyways, the other thing that I am working on is the iPad version of IBM COGNOS 10 reports using only report studio. (Please note – no SDK involved here). I see that the reviews online claim that IBM COGNOS 10 is more mobile friendly, but I haven’t seen any major changes in the basic release version. The only thing that has inspired me is the Business Insight, which we were about to design in the with the help of some Java. Our concept was more like a portal for COGNOS reports. Coming back to iPad, I have designed the templates (on 8.3 COGNOS) but am still looking for some good images that would enhance the look and feel. I will soon put in a video to demo this feature.