One of the key improvements in Changepoint 2017 SP1 is Cognos Analytics 11. This new version of Cognos provides a modern-looking, simplified interface that improves the user experience and offers enhanced capabilities to both business users and report authors. However, as we have also discussed in our latest Tech Talk, navigation is very different than Cognos 10.2 and it definitely takes some time to get used to the new UI. Here is an informal “Cognos 11 Cheat Sheet” that can be utilized to steer you in the right direction.

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.

Other options for a report:

To save a snap-shot or a report view of a non-interactive report, run the report and then click the ‘save’ icon. For reports in 11.x ‘interactive’ style, use ‘run as’ and select ‘run in background’ to save a snap-shot. You can use ‘save as’ to save a report view.

As you add or access things, they stay in your ‘recent’ menu at the top of the portal. Click the name to run or edit the report again, or click the ‘X’ to remove the ones you don’t want there. They only stay there for your current session. You can click the top left ‘Home’ button to get back to the main portal.

There is also a ‘Recent’ icon in the left-hand pane where you will see content you have accessed recently, and the recent items are shown on the home page.

To get to the administration console, click ‘Manage’ at the very bottom-left.

To create an old-style workspace, click ‘New’, then ‘Other’.

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)

Other items

Using images:

  • For Cognos 11, the path on the application tier server is c:\Program Files\ibm\cognos\analytics\webcontent\bi\samples\images (there is no gateway server).
  • If you have existing images, move them to that folder after the upgrade. The old location was C:\Program Files\ibm\cognos\c10\webcontent\samples\images
  • To reference images in reports, Users can override the path for the images to the images path, e.g. ../samples/images/yes.gif. They will not be able to use the ‘browse’ option, since that requires Webdav to be enabled (which most customers do not allow).

Copy report to/from clipboard:

Edit a report or create a new report. Click the ‘pages’ or ‘queries’ icon, right-click the ‘report’ node.

Create a drill-through definition:

Select the column, select the ‘…’ and select the ‘Drill-Through Definitions’ option.

Create list headers and grouped headers:

Select the list, click the ‘…’, select ‘list headers and footers’ and select ‘List page header’. Select the list (using the three dots on the top left of the list object), then click the ‘properties’ icon on the very top right. Under the ‘General’ section, change the ‘Column titles’ option to ‘At start of details’. Under the ‘Pagination’ section, select ‘repeat every page’, if appropriate.

Select the list heading and in the pop-out panel, select the ‘split cell’ option. Select multiple columns and click the ‘Merge cells’ option, if appropriate.

Report default run options:

Cognos 11 does not provide either users nor administrators a way to select between the 10x “default action” options of “View most recent output”, “Run the Report” or “Open with Editor”. The “default action” is applied (in Cognos 11) as follows):

  • Report is Interactive:
    • Display as interactive HTML
  • Report is Non-Interactive:
    • Saved output exists – View the most recent output
    • Saved output does not exist – Run the Report (as HTML)

Reports that are upgraded from previous versions are automatically created as non-interactive but can be changed, if desired.

When running reports from Changepoint, the report style and whether it has a saved version determine the report behavior. If a saved report exists, it will be rendered. If one does not exist, the report will run real-time. This is regardless of the report style (10.x or 11.x).

  1. Run with full interactivity=Yes, the report runs in the new-style (aka Titan) viewer
  2. If Run with full interactivity=No, Report style =11.x, the report runs in the new style (aka Titan viewer in classic viewer mode
  3. If Run with full interactivity=No, Report style=10.x, the report runs in 10.2.2 classic viewer mode

 

Changing a report to interactive mode:

Edit the report. Click the ‘Pages’ view and click the ‘Report’ node at the very top. Then click the ‘properties’ icon (top right) and set the ‘run with full interactivity’ field to yes.

Note: the behavior of select-and-search prompts is different when a report is in full interactive vs limited interactive mode.

Full interactive:

Non-interactive:

Users have more flexibility in full interactive mode, including:

  • change the sort order of a data container
  • set or edit filters
  • change the aggregation
  • group a column
  • change the type of a data container, i.e. to a chart
  • save the changes as new report
  • interact with charts

Adding links to profile pages:

When a report is in non-interactive mode, you can use the same approach as before to add a profile link via an html item. All existing reports will be upgraded and set to non-interactive. The query item will be re-named ‘Profile link (Legacy)’ to indicate it’s used with the legacy report styles.

To add a profile link when you want to have the report in interactive mode, do the following:

Add the data fields to the list/crosstab as usual. Add the ‘Profile link’ data item to your query, e.g.

[|Projects].[|Project].[|Profile Link]

Drag an html item onto the list:

In properties, set it to use a data item value:

Use the ‘profile link’ data item, e.g.

[|Projects].[|Project].[Profile Link]

Un-lock the report (use the ‘…’ icon on the top right)

Add a ‘custom control’ in the cell, after the html item:

Set the UI type and Module path as shown below:

../../ProfileLink

The list would look something like this:

Change the column heading to something like ‘Name’ or ‘profile link’.

Lock and save the report.

Note: profile links using the custom control will not be visible if the report is used in a workspace or any report format other than html. The old-style profile links will be visible on workspaces, but also will not be visible any report format other than html. Add the basic ‘name’ column or use conditional rendering to ensure the entity name is available in all formats.

Changing the package on a report:

Click the source tab, right-click on the package and select ‘Replace package’. Select the new package and click Open.

Condition Explorer:

Click on ‘Queries’. The condition explorer is on the top of the navigation tree.

Adding visualizations:

You can import visualizations into the library using the administration console. Although visualizations are built in as part of Cognos 11, there is a new set of visualizations for Cognos 11 that you can import (e.g. a Gantt object). Note: to use the newly imported items in a report or dashboard, you may have to click the ‘filter’ icon when selecting a visualization, as some of them may appear as ‘legacy’.

Enabling the Interactive Report performance option

Report authors can see the query performance of their report objects when they preview a report.

To enable the option:

  • Within the authoring mode go to the “Run option” dropdown and select Show run options.
  • Select the “Include performance details” checkbox and click OK. No other configuration is required.
  • To disable this feature, uncheck the option and click OK.

To view the performance details:

  • Run the report in html. The execution time will be shown below each report object. The option is only available for the report author, not any other user running or editing the report.

Data modules:

Administrators can create their own data modelling without using Framework Manager, including data from the Changepoint model, uploaded files or other data sources such as a direct SQL Server database connection. The data can be combined, e.g. a spreadsheet containing the targets per sales region can be combined with the Changepoint package to show target vs engagement contract amounts or target vs project billing amounts per sales region.

Data modules can also be used to make data that is not in the Changepoint package available to users for reporting and dashboards, as an alternative to using custom SQL directly in reports.

  • The license terms with IBM only allow data from the Changepoint database to be accessed via Cognos. Customers who wish to access other data must contact IBM and purchase the appropriate additional licenses.
  • The data module capabilities are very simple and will not support complex scenarios such as defining a SQL select statement, calling a function, using unions or advanced filters and calculations. Administrators can select from an existing SQL Server view, which can be used to accommodate more advanced scenarios.
  • There is a known issue with ‘bit’ fields being un-supported (e.g. the Changepoint ‘Deleted’ field).
  • When selecting the Changepoint model, you can only select the whole thing, not pieces of it. In other words, you cannot use a data module to create a sub-set of data and fields that can be used in dashboards. You can use a data set for that.
  • Uploaded files are only available if they are in ‘team content’ (not ‘my content’).

If you create a data source connection directly to the SQL Server database, note that views are available. Scroll to the bottom; they appear after all the tables are listed.

Data sets:

Administrators can create cached sets of data that can be used for dashboards. Data sets are useful to:

  • Simplify the data available to end users when they create dashboards (i.e. limit the number of fields that are available to avoid confusion)
  • improve query performance if your database or web connection is slow or you have a large volume of data (data can be pre-filtered to prevent users from over-burdening the system)
  • reduce the load on an overworked database (especially during peak periods)
  • retain a version of the data at a specific time (the data is cached).

To create a data set, navigate in ‘team content’ to a package or data module and click the ‘…’.

Setting permissions for consumers:

It is highly recommended that you limit the data consumers have access to for ‘self-service’, both to make it easier for them and to make sure they’re not negatively impacting performance on the server.

If you want to limit the data consumers have access to when they create dashboards, you can change the permissions on the packages. For example, you may want them to run reports that are created from the Changepoint package but only use data sets to create their own dashboards. To configure that, do the following:

Move the reports into a new folder that is directly under ‘team content’ (not under the package name).

Move the data sets into a new folder that is directly under ‘team content’ (not under the package name).

For each package, change the permissions for the ‘consumers’ group (make sure you select ‘Override parent permissions’ and ‘Apply to all children’):

Consumers will be able to run reports that use the packages, but can only select the data sets when creating their own dashboards.