A great way to get me to figure something out is to tell me it can’t be done. Soooo….

I recently received a request to set the default email option to “attach report output” instead of “include link”. It’s a fairly common request, so it was surprising that there was no officially supported way. It turns out that IBM did sneak in a way in 12.1, without updating the docs!

To begin with, you need to be a sys admin. Open the hamburger menu, configuration, system. Expand Advanced Settings, and paste the following into the Key:
Admin.defaultEmailAttachReport by default the value will be “myDefault”. Change the value to true, like you see in the following image:

Close, log off and back in, and try sending an email (via Schedule or Run As) through Cognos. If it worked, the attach report output should be toggled on.

Now this is great for those on 12.1 and higher, but what about the poor folks on earlier versions? I only have 12.0 to test on, but we can do the following.

On the gateway server, navigate to the following folder:
\ibm\cognos\analytics\webcontent\bi\ba-react-admin

There should be a single JS file in there. ba-react-admin.min.js
BACK THAT UP! Copy it, print it out, carve it into slate, whatever it takes for you to restore it if we break anything (or if you ever need support from IBM, we can pretend we didn’t modify any internal files. Don’t worry, my lips are sealed.).

Now that we backed it up, let’s open it in notepad and look for the following string:
defaultEmailAsURL:!(null!==(r=a.props.schedule.getOption("email","runOptionBoolean"))&&void 0!==r&&r.value)

change that to:
defaultEmailAsURL:false

Now let’s search for
defaultEmailAsAttachment:!0

change that to
defaultEmailAsAttachment:true

(Yes, it’s technically the same thing, but !0 for true is just silly).

Since we’re updating a JS file, we don’t need to restart Cognos. Clear your browser cache, and refresh. Try doing a run as again. The email options should be updated.

I’ve been doing some testing, and haven’t seen any unexpected side effects from doing this, but I cannot guarantee that this won’t cause issues. If you have multiple gateways, you’ll need to update each of them. This change won’t survive any updates or fix packs, but if you are upgrading, just upgrade to 12.1 already!

Also, a note about the blog. I’ve been making some changes. The biggest is the removal of the comments. This was not a decision I made lightly, but unfortunately the amount of spam I’ve received was one of the major reasons I stopped posting. I had 4 different spam blockers, blocking upwards of five thousand spam comments each month, and spam was still getting through. I’ll try to find some compromise here, but it’s not likely to happen soon.