Cognos 11 - Cheat sheet

Changepoint navigation

There are three section items under the ‘Analytics’ section:

• Analytics portal – launches the Cognos ‘welcome’ page (the old ‘Cognos connection’), where you can run, edit, create reports / workspaces / dashboards and access system administration (see ‘other items’ below). All users have access to this section item.
• Create dashboard – creates a new dashboard (discussed later). All users have access to this section item.
• Create report – creates a new report. Users with one of ‘Cognos administrator’, ‘Cognos Business author’ or ‘Cognos professional author’ features have access to this section
  • The licensing has changed to only one ‘author’ type (see tools, below). If customers do not wish their business author users to have access to create reports, they can remove that feature from the users.

The Changepoint Reports tree-view will contain Cognos reports, workspaces, dashboards, active reports and report views, and they can be used when creating Changepoint portals and portlets.

Reports on profile pages will open in-line for all browsers. If any errors are encountered with existing reports, customers should re-create them or upgrade them to Cognos 11.

Portals created from workspaces will continue to open in a new window for IE. They can be converted to dashboards or multi-tabbed reports to take advantage of the new Cognos 11 functionality, which supports all browsers. 

Portlets created from workspaces will open inline for IE. If there are any issues with the workspaces, they can be re-created as reports in Cognos 11, which supports all browsers. Changepoint will not address any issues with workspaces that are opened inline.

Cognos 11 Tools

The main tools in Cognos 11 are the ‘create report’ and ‘create dashboard’ user interfaces.

‘Create report’ is the tool used to create reports, and is a replacement for the old ‘Report Studio’ and ‘Workspace Advanced’ tools (those tools no longer exist).

‘Create dashboard’ is a new tool that allows user ‘self-service’ and replaces the old ‘Cognos Workspace’ functionality.

‘Cognos administration’ still exists as it did before and is accessed from the ‘Manage’ menu.

There is no concept of ‘Cognos Connection’ in Cognos 11. The Cognos ‘Home Page’ replaces it.

‘Create story’ is a new tool that combines interactive objects of dashboards and allows more of a presentation style with scenes, conclusions and animations (e.g. objects appear or disappear over a timeline).

General navigation in Cognos

To run a report, find it in the ‘Recent’, ‘My content’ (formerly ‘My folders’) or ‘Team content’ (formerly ‘Public folders’) and click the name. Hover over the report name and click the ellipsis ‘…’ to access other options, such as run options, create a report view or edit the report. You can expand the section to see the full tree-view. Click the breadcrumbs at the top to navigate up and down the report folders. Your most recent reports are shown on the home page. Click the report name to run it, or click the ‘…’ for more options. Note: there are less options for the reports on the home page.

To schedule a report, find it in Recent, team content or my content, hover over the report name, click the ‘…’ and select ‘Properties’. Click the ‘Schedule’ tab and click the + to add one.

Create a new report

From the Cognos ‘Welcome’ screen, from the bottom left select New, Report (or select ‘Create report’ from the Changepoint UI). Select a theme or template and click Okay.

Click the + in the middle of the screen to select an object. The most commonly used objects are there by default. If you don’t see the one you want, click the Toolbox icon and drag from the toolbox in the left-hand pane. You can also right-click to move items in and out of the pinned section. Pinned items will appear when you click the + in the middle of the screen. Note: charts are now called ‘Visualizations’. If you want to get to the old style ‘charts’, once you’ve selected ‘Visualization’, click the filter icon on the top right and select ‘Charts’.

If you add a table first, you can click the + in each cell to add an object.

The layout options and moving / re-sizing objects is still limited when creating a report. Insert the objects in tables and blocks for more control. Sizing objects is still done on properties.

Name the object and query, then click Okay.

If you selected the toolbox, click the ‘Data’ icon from the navigation pane. Click the + to add a source.

From Team content, select Changepoint (or ChangepointUnsecured) and click Open. It may take a bit of time to load.

Expand the Changepoint data model and start dragging fields into the object. You can use ctrl-click to select multiple fields and drag them on.

To add/edit query items, select the object, click the ‘more’ button (…) and select ‘Go to Query’.

The query items UI appears, allowing you to add / change query items. Click the ‘properties’ icon on the top right to change the aggregation, etc for a query item.

To go back to your page view, click the ‘Pages’ icon on the left, then click your page or prompt page.

To add or manage your queries, click the ‘queries’ icon.

Click the ‘Queries’ node to add/edit queries, or select an individual query below that to add/edit items in the specific query. The objects associated to the query are shown. Make a habit of naming your queries and objects so you can tell them apart. Note: if there is a custom SQL query, the objects will not show. You can see which query the object is associated with by clicking the object, then click the ‘properties’ icon on the top right.

If the ‘Queries’ node is clicked you can double-click to edit a query.

Click the toolbox icon to add queries, joins, unions, SQL, etc.

You can click an individual query from the tree-view, e.g. click Query1.

Click the ‘Data’ button to add more items to your query from the model or your SQL query.

Click the ‘Toolbox’ icon to add calculations and filters to your query.

Use the ‘Pages’ icon to get back to your design or prompt page.

Click the eyeball icon (aka ‘page views’) on the top right to switch between page design, page preview and page structure. Page preview shows what the report looks like with data in it and runs in the same container. Use the eyeball icon to switch back to page design.

Click the ‘edit’ button to toggle between report design and report preview.

You can also use the ‘Run options’ button to view the report in other formats. It goes to a new window.

Note: there is no default ‘run’ format (it ran automatically in html in 10.2.2). After selecting the ‘run’ button, you must select a format before it runs.

In ‘show run options’ you can set the report to run with ‘limited data’ or ‘no data’, useful when you are testing a report multiple times on something that has a large amount of data.

When you have the general page properties selected, click the ‘more’ button on the top right to see more options:

To create a prompt page, select the Pages icon, select the Prompt pages node. Select the toolbox icon and drag a page onto the prompt page section. Double-click the prompt page to start adding items.

Create a dashboard

Dashboards are the new version of ‘workspace’. Instead of creating reports first, then dragging objects from the report onto the dashboard, you drag objects directly onto the dashboard.Note: dashboards are geared towards simple visualizations.

If you want to see tables or cross-tabs of data, a report is more functional. Note: a ‘list’ in a dashboard is not the same thing as a ‘list’ object in a report. Use a ‘table’ in a dashboard if you want a flat listing of data in columns.

From the Cognos portal, click ‘new’ on the bottom left and select ‘Dashboard’. Select a layout and template and click Okay. Note: the default ‘freeform’ template does not size items based on the screen real-estate. It’s better to use one of the other layouts.

Hover on the right side of the ‘Selected Sources’ panel and click the + to add a new source. Select Changepoint (or ChangepointUnsecured) from team content. You can select other data sources as well; see ‘other items’.

Find the data items you want to use and drag them onto the surface; you can use ctrl-click to add multiple items at once. Cognos will select an appropriate visualization based on the type of data you’ve dragged on. If you don’t like what it chose, click the ‘Expand’ icon on the top right of the object. Click ‘Change visualization’ on the bottom right.

Click the sizing or move icons to get your object in the desired place and size.

Drag multiple objects onto the dashboard. Cognos will automatically create links between the objects based on the data in them (only if they’re all from the same data source). You can see the links by clicking the ‘View widget connections’ icon on the top right. Select an object and on the top left, select ‘create a new connection’ or ‘break all links’.

You can also start by dragging a visualization to the dashboard, then adding data to it.

To create a calculation, click the ‘…’ at the very top of the ‘data source’ section:

You can also right-click on a numeric field in the data source to do a simple calculation.

Drag into the ‘all tabs’ or ‘this tab’ sections to add filters that apply to the whole dashboard or to one tab. You can pre-filter data by opening the ‘data tray’ section at the bottom of the screen (not available if the ‘Changepoint’ or ‘ChangepointUnsecured’ package is used as a data source). Click on a column heading in the grid to set sorting or filtering.

You can enable the chart titles, fill/border colours and opacity for the visualizations in properties. Use ctrl-click to multi-select the objects to set the same properties for all of them. Set properties (theme, background colour) for the whole dashboard.

You can click ‘save’ to save the dashboard with your current filters, or ‘save as’ to create a new dashboard.

Dashboard, Report or Workspace?

So far, IBM has not announced a specific date to sunset the workspace functionality, but it will be eventually; they have stated that it will not be supported after this release and that customers should be encouraged to use either reports or dashboards as an alternative.

 

Requirement	Tool to use
Multi-tabbed collection of reports / charts used in a Changepoint portal	·        Create a multi-tabbed report (use the option to display report pages as tabs), configure it as a portlet and add it to a portal. ·        Create each report as a portlet and combine them into a portal. ·        Create an active report (which contains controlled, static data but allows some user interaction).
‘Self-serve’ graphical representation of data, user selects the data to work with	Dashboard
‘Self-serve’ list or cross-tab for Export to Excel	Dashboards have limited list and cross-tab functionality. It is better to use an existing report (which can be designed to prompt for which columns to display).
User interaction, e.g. grouping, filtering or sorting a list	Report in 11.X style
Changing a list to a graphical representation, removing some existing columns	Use a dashboard.
Using a saved version of the report in the tree-view or in a dashboard	Report in non-interactive mode, either scheduled or using ‘save’ / ‘save as’.

 

There is no direct ‘conversion’ from a workspace. To convert a workspace to a multi-tabbed report:

• Edit each report that is contained in the workspace. You need to use the IE browser to copy and paste.
• Re-name the queries, conditional styles and report pages so they are unique, e.g. pre-pend the report name to each query and each report page (including the prompt pages)
• Copy and paste the queries from the source report to the ‘master’ report. Right-click on each query and select ‘copy’. Go to the ‘Queries’ page on the ‘master’ report, right-click and select ‘paste’. Copy the single queries first, then the queries that contain joins, unions, etc.
• Click the ‘…’ on the main toolbar and select ‘Conditional Styles’. Select all the styles and use CTRL-C on your keyboard to copy them to the clipboard. In the ‘master’ report, bring up the ‘Conditional Styles’ dialogue and use CTRL-V to paste. Note: style and render variables cannot be copied and must be re-done in the target report.
• From the ‘Report Pages’ section, copy the report pages from the source report to the ‘master’ report.
• Once the pages and queries are in one report, objects can be moved from one page to another, if desired, and the prompt pages combined.

If the report is complex and uses multiple queries, it may be onerous to convert it. Workspace can be used, at least in the short term.

To enable or disable the ability for users to use the legacy tools, follow this procedure:

1. Navigate to the \analytics\configuration directory on the Cognos application tier server
2. Copy/Rename the installData.properties to installData.properies.backup
3. Edit the installData.properties file
4. Set the parameter:
   • From:
   • LegacyLaunchable=0
   • To:
   • LegacyLaunchable=1
5. Save
6. Restart the service(s)

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