Animated dropdown checkboxes and creating custom on-hover events

For those who missed it, PerformanceG2 is sponsoring my trip to the IOD this year. In return, I’ve written a couple of articles for their blog.

The first is a fancy way of converting
needing-to-scroll-for-prompts-make-users-angry

To
sliders-are-awesome

This is a very easy technique to use, simply copy in the main script into an HTML item at the top of the page, and add another script at the bottom to call the functions. Since it doesn’t use the 10.2 Prompt API, you can implement it in every version since 8.4. To learn more about that technique, read the post here.

The next technique is a bit more interesting (at least for me). There have been many times where clients have asked for a way to add more insights to the tooltips in charts. For example, users may want to hover over a micro chart and see a magnified version:
Magnifying Microcharts

In that image each chart had the country ID hidden right next to it. Hovering over the chart would then unhide a div with the same ID and position it directly over the cursor. Moving away from the chart would then hide it.

The same fading functions were used for this next technique:
filtering a list

Each area in the map has an onhover event attached. There are some internal Cognos JS functions that will pull the contextual data of that area. So if you’re hovering over a dot, the functions would return the series, category, and measure of the dot. Hovering over a legend would return that specific series. Since this is referencing internal Cognos JS functions I can’t guarantee that it will work in previous (or future) versions.

Read up on that technique here.

It looks like the post is down. The popups report XML can be found here: Popups on Hover Report XML (1630 downloads)

updated animated checkbox prompt: updated-animated-checkbox.txt (921 downloads)