IBM COGNOS 10.2 iPad mobile report samples xmls and creating the Metric Control active report

The new IBM COGNOS 10.2 active reports and their mobile samples on the iPad are really fascinating to look at on what we can achieve with the new IBM COGNOS version.  To what I have seen and experienced with the creation of active reports; there are a lot of advantages and disadvantages depending on how we want utilize them.  Especially the color scheme and the new graph representation are good; where as the size and the filters options avaialble kills the active report on the other hand. We did find that it has a lot of restrictions on the way filters work. I will add in my opinion of IBM COGNOS active reports soon.

Anyways, I found this URL that leads to the IBM portal with all the report ppts, xmls and screen captures. Every time a new IBM COGNOS mobile sample is updated on the IBM COGNSO iPad app this page gets updated with the report specifications.

ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/data/sw-library/cognos/mobile/All/index.html

The only thing to observe here is that, the ‘Control Metrics’ sample has lots of custom graphs / images that need to be added manually for now.

All you got to do is download the visualizations from 

https://www.analyticszone.com/homepage/web/visualizationsDownload.action 

and import them to your IBM COGNOS install location and you have them available for your active reports; just like any other custom report that we build with our own custom images.

F Y I --- The new IBM COGNOS 10.2.1 has improved icons and colors,  the feel is modern.

IBM COGNOS 10 Active Reports and the iPad IBM COGNOS app

Couple of weeks back I got a glance into the COGNOS 10.2.1 version that is yet to release and last week I saw an update to the IBM COGNOS app on iPad which had an extra sample report added to it - 'Control Metrics'  and some additional features like pinch and zoom; the 'to highlight, draw on the report' option...etc. It is just fantastic and amazing to see such small things added in to make a huge impact for the end user's usability. I have added a screen short of the sample report from IBM COGNOS iPad app.

I love the colors and the new graphs used to represent the data. I am sure months of work would have gone into creating these wonderful reports from top data scientist at IBM COGNOS.  The idea of including gestures and small animations to these Active Reports add the wow factor.

I should say, we had implemented the left panel using JQuery on the 8.4 report studio but now in IBM COGNOS 10 report studio, I am assuming it will be a built-in features. This shows that IBM COGNOS is working very closely with a lot blogger out there who add in sample XML showing their creative scripting on top of the IBM COGNOS report studio.

I looked into the  some of the sample report XML that I found online, the reports are really really complex. One important thing to notice is that, IBM COGNOS 10 Active Reports are designed for a certain set of reports where we got to show a lot of content at high level but not the general detailed list or cross tab data. There are some limitation like the filtering options but lets keep it a side for now.

Over the last couple of months, I have been working on creating some really cool reports with new themes and graphs.  Am very excited using this new version of IBM COGNOS 10 features.