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When this first happened, I was actually on a call with the IBM support going through an older error that we were facing. If you look at the second image you can see that; the more I drill down, the no of pages increases. For a while I was thinking I need to re install everything on the server. But when I tried the same ‘COGNOS Administrator’ from my local machine through a URL, things seemed to be working fine.

So I believe the problem seems to be with the browse and its settings rather than COGNOS. So I upgraded the web browser on the server and things got back to normal. One can also try to delete the cache memory in the browser.

COGNOS 8.3 [the_dispatcher] com.cognos.pogo.performance.PerformanceIndicationHandler Error

I came across this bizarre issue while running an existing report. This particular report used to run fine; but all of a sudden it started throwing this error. I was wondering why ? We never touched the report and the modified date was dated way back last year.
Coming to the point, I tried checking the metadata and other totals / sub totals in the report. We even restarted the cognos service thinking it is something to do with the dispatcher.
But the solution was ……. We had added a some new filters to the metadata and the report was running on older filters. So all we had to do was to rename the filters in the report to the newer ones and things got going smoothly.

The problem with COGNOS is that, it does not point out the exact error message.

COGNOS 8.3 displaying date format from MM/DD/YY to MMDDYYYY

This part actually looks simple and straight forward. All I did was, go to data format property of the column date and set the pattern to MMDDYYYY. But the interesting part was that, the output was stranger; something like 041042009.
I was thinking, why the day is in 3 digits instead of 2? The reason being it counts the days from the start of the year. So if you want to use the MMDDYYYY format keeping the days to 2 digits, then you need to write the pattern as MMddYYYY. Isn’t it silly?

COGNOS 8.3 Error - Setup cannot continue because an outstanding reboot is required. Please reboot your computer and try again

I haven’t come across this issue but my colleague did; it is such a strange error that even after rebooting the system several times we were getting this error. So I logged into the COGNOS knowledge bank and found the solution.

Basically this issue may occur when trying to reinstall Impromptu or PowerPlay (Series 7) or COGNOS 8.3 on Windows operating system. The setup prompts to reboot the system but rebooting the system several times does not help and we get the error message “Setup cannot continue because a reboot is required.”

So the solution here is:
1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. From the Tools menu, click Folder Options, View, Hidden files and folders radio button.
3. From the Start menu, click Search, All Files or Folders and enter GSUNINSTALL.FLG.
4. Rename the GSUNINSTALL.FLG to GSUNINSTALL.OLD in the local Temp directory.
5. Proceed with the installation.

COGNOS – Using a blob column in this query requires that the query subject ….. must have either a key or a unique index

BLOB is basically an abbreviation for Binary Large OBject. It is a collection of binary data in the database.
The snapshot above shows an error because of the BLOB and one of the main reasons for that error could be a particular field in the DB that is a text field. At least in my case, when I first encountered this issue, it was because of ‘text’ field in the db which is not supported by COGNOS. So the solution for this is to change the text field in the DB into a VarChar.
In one of the metadata queries, we again faced this issue even though we had updated the DB long back. This error started coming when we added new data into one metadata query @ the package level. When I tested the query individually at the import layer; it seems to be working but when I am combining couple of these BLOB VarChar from different metadata queries I was facing this issue again. So I named these same objects differently at the import layer level (on different queries) and joined them @ the package level it seemed to be working.
I am sure that this error had nothing to do with the blob issue but it was still throwing the BLOB error. I would say; always name the metadata with different and specific names so that the system does not get confused when we create relationships.

Content Manager did not return an object for the requested search path COGNOS 8.3

This issue usually comes up when it is a drill through or a drill down and there are couple of issues why we could get this error:

1. Firstly, check the path of the report ones. Mainly check the spaces or change in name of the report. Sometimes what happens is that; when some one uses a report they might save it with a different name and delete the actual one.

2. The other thing is to check the package. It might happen that we develop the report in one package and without deploying we copy / paste the report in a different package. Later when we delete the actual package the Link to the second level report is lost.

This happens to me a lot as we develop reports in one package and test it in a different one and I don't get enough time to create and deploy the package every time.

3. The other issue is a very very rare case but has happened to me once, when we deployed the package; COGNOS did not convert all the reports properly and the paths in the reports did not get updated.

COGNOS 8.3 REPORT STUDIO - Columns or rows missing from crosstab if they contain no data

Faced this issue when one of the client wanted to display all the dates in the date range even though there was no data present for that particular date ‘Column’. This client was very particular about the format of the report and what they wanted. There was no compromise on anything at all.

Following are the steps we need to follow and we can solve the issue.
1) Create a "Column Query", containing only the column information and a dummy data item with a value of 1.
2) Create a "Row Query", containing only the row information and a dummy data item with a value of 1.
3) Create a "Dimension Query" query that joins the queries from steps 1 and 2 on dummy. This requires that the Outer Join Allowed property of the query be set to Allowed. This creates a cross join that includes all possible combinations of rows and columns
4) Create a fourth query that contains the data for the crosstab. This is the same as a normal crosstab report.
5) Join the queries from steps 3 and 4, using cardinality of 1..1 and 0..n respectively. In the join create 2 links, for both the data items (row and column). When dragging data items into this new query, ensure that you are dragging in the row and column headings from the "Dimension Query".

This ensures that all possible rows and columns will be returned, even if there is no data associated with them. (You can also find this solution in the COGNOS knowledge bank.)