Sorry, no screenshots for this one. Blame InfoSec.

Cognos 10 has a nice little checkbox that you can set to have authors use only the design language when creating reports. Without this option any changes made to any of the non-design languages may break existing reports. Report authors will have to always use the design language when building reports.

Sadly that checkbox doesn’t exist in previous versions. You can, however, manually change the model.xml and add the same tag.

First, back up your model.xml. You don’t want to mess this up.

Place the following code between the </defaultLocale> and <namespace> tags.

 <fixIdsToDefaultLocale>true</fixIdsToDefaultLocale> 

Publish your model, create a new report, drag in a data item into a query. While the data item caption should appear as your active language, the reference should appear in the design language. Remember to close your browser completely before creating the new report, as you may inadvertently use a cached version of the model.

I have only tested this in 8.4.1, but it may work in previous versions. I don’t know and don’t have access to FM of previous versions, so I’d welcome feedback indicating which versions it works.