Unlike previous years, this year was almost all work. I didn’t really have any free time (what little time I had was devoted to the fine art of inebriation, with many thanks to Motio for doing there part), so I couldn’t give a daily overview. On the flip side, I did have much greater access to the IBM developers this time, and had the chance to ask a few of my most urgent questions. This is actually the primary reason for me attending IBM Insight – the chance to look them in the eye and hopefully get some straight answers. There were a few people who dropped by the booth to try to chat, but apparently I was never there. Sorry! I have a tendency to wander around and collect pens/USB Sticks/tchotchkes for the kids. If it’s still relevant, drop me a line and we’ll chat.

I’m sure everyone is wondering about the new version of Cognos. The most important thing first. I do not need to change the name of my blog – IBM is sticking with the Cognos moniker. It is now christened Cognos Analytics, but for the purpose of abbreviations I’ll just call it C11.

The authoring environment has gone under a major re-factoring. The Report Studio we all know and love (well, I love it) has undergone a substantial face-lift. The Report Viewer has also undergone many changes. Previously an authored report was essentially static. You could, in theory, write JS to manipulate objects on the page but that always came with some level of risk. Dashboarding and datasets have also gone under the knife and have emerged substantially improved.

Unfortunately I don’t have access to the C11 demo yet. This any screenshots will be from Youtube videos. As soon as I do get access, I’ll try to publish some articles with original media.

Authoring
The immediate reaction is that it seems to be a completely new tool. The menu bar at the top is gone, clicking on certain regions opens up a circular context menu, and the toolbox is actually arranged in a logical format.

This is actually still using rsapp.htm. In theory, all of the same functionality is still there. The locations for the menu options have been moved, and this time they actually feel logical. To get to the report properties, for example, you don’t go through the File menu option – you actually click on the report object. Additional report properties have also been moved here, so it does make things a little easier to find. Moving things around does have its drawbacks – in the hands-on demo it took me a minute to find the location to switch from an individual page to a specific query. A few other features took me some time to find.

When a table or block is dragged in, a plus icon appears in the center. Clicking on that creates a radial context menu.

The items that appear in the menu are the items from the “pinned” section in the toolbox. Easily changed by report authors.

Another very positive change is the query explorer now shows all objects associated with that query. Expand a query, and jump to the object by clicking on it. The more complex reports tend to accumulate a lot of QueryNs, so this should speed cleaning up the reports.

Reports built in this new RS version will automatically open in the new Report Viewer (this is a property on the report level which can be changed). The new report viewer should work with the Prompt API (though the hands-on was getting an error when I tried), but all other JS is likely to cause issues. This should be okay, as a majority of the JS that I write has some similar functionality. The report viewer appears to be a modified Workspace Advanced. End users can make various simple modifications to the report output, resorting, basic calculations in lists or crosstabs. Users will only be able to save those changes if they have write access to the report, or if they save a report view in their folders. There are plans to extend the published API, but I’ve heard no specifics yet.

Reports upgrades to C11 will continue to run in the old report viewer! This means there is a very good chance I won’t get frantic calls to fix broken reports. As usual I received no promises – only “in theory” and “should”.

Some of my biggest requests, master/details on singletons (everyone should vote on it here: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=62883), and adding native functions to the dimensional function set (TM1 especially, it’s an IBM product! Why can’t I use the TM1 functions?! I should stop before this turns into a TM1 rant.) have not yet materialized.

Analysis Studio and Query Studio are still included in this version! While the direction is to remove it, eventually, there are a few gaps that couldn’t be overcome. Specifically with the getting the filters to show at the top. But this is the last version with AS and QS, for reals this time!

Datasets are very interesting.
Unlike previous versions, you can create datasets on existing packages. Drag in the fields you want and Cognos will save the results in a local table. This will by, by default, on a DB2 instance installed automatically by Cognos. This is essentially a materialized view, but I don’t have any information on scheduling it. I am guessing that there will be governors administrators can set on this – number of rows, size of output, max runtime of query, and similar settings.

This is a completely web based tool, which is supposed to be simple enough for end users. In theory it should automatically determine how the joins should be built. See more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYlbiWeBgtA

These datasets are designed to feed the new dashboarding system, which is truly impressive.
The dashboarding tool is obviously designed for analysts and end users. It does not offer the wide range of optoins and capabilities we’ve come to love in RS. However, it does many things that RS can’t do. The tool only works with the datasets, so the response time is fast – the data is already aggregated to the users needs and it’s automatically using DQM.

Drag in a measure, and it will create a block with that value. Drag an attribute on top of the measure, and it turns into a bar chart. Drag in another measure and it adds another bar, or add an attribute and it turns into a cluster or a scatterplot. We can turn this into another data container, like a list, with a simple right-click. Now for the interesting bit – drag in another measure onto the screen. The list just created will filter that measure. Just like the “Global Filters” from Workspace, you can filter any object by clicking on any item in that list. Furthermore, users can now drag in an iterator, similar to the item in Active Reports. But this one can automatically loop through members.

I can’t give it justice without an animated screenshot. Instead, just watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRbulHoUQC4

Navigating
The Cognos Connection screen is completely revamped. We won’t have the same system with tabs across the top and navigating folders. I’m personally sceptical of this, and nobody’s been able to give a satisfactory answer about where the tabs from C10 will actually go. This is actually my biggest concern when it comes to customer adoption.

The back end is mostly unchanged. Reports still use the same XML format, and the Cognos content store is (supposedly) still the same. This fact, coupled with the option to use the old Report Viewer, gives me hope that upgrading should be quick and painless.

On the non-Cognos-centric side, Watson is being pushed hard now. There’s even a way to import the results from Cognos reports into directly into the Watson web app. It seems to work through a CMS call through your browser. Lets say you have a list report. You provide the location for that report, answer all of the prompts, and your browser will run it in the background and send the results back to Watson. They warned that this can be very slow with large datasets. Stretch, walk around, get an expensive coffee from that little shop on the other side of town slow. Watson is now powering several different applications, some of whom were showcased throughout Insight. Research, shopping, travel, hospital, robots – there seems very little that Watson can’t do.

As usual, IBM Insight was a lot of fun and I strongly recommend attending. The networking possibilities alone are phenomenal, when coupled with inexpensive certification testing, and shiny toys (I got to fly a drone, and I saw a 3D printed car driven by a robot, and I got to play with a Van der Graaf generator, and probably a more interesting experiences I’m forgetting) make Insight a unique experience.

Addendum: My apologies for the lack of updates and replies to comments recently, my current client is taking all of my time. The current phase of the project is nearly over, so I’m going to soon have some time to go over my list.

I will be leading a 5 hour session on RAVE at the Schaumburg IBM Offices near Chicago August 12, 2015. Space is limited, so make sure to register early and often! Details can be found here: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07eb54blte62fd6806&llr=nuulfnqab

IBM released their new visualization engine quite some time ago, and great strides have been made in improving the usability. Sadly the documentation is still as opaque as ever, and there’s outside of the IBM Visualization forum, there’s not much support.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to work with it a great deal as my current client has some very interesting requirements. This article will actually serve as the basis of a talk I’ve been asked to give to the other developers at this client. I am planning on a series of articles on RAVE, (as a quick side note, I find simply writing about methodologies teaches me just as much as reading about them – everyone should stop what they’re doing and start their own blogs.) and this may recap some of what I’ve written previously.

To begin, let’s talk about the language behind RAVE, vizJSON.

As you can see from the name, vizJSON is based on JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). The basic structure is:

1. Objects: {}
2. Arrays: []
3. Key/Value Pairs: “Key”:”Value”

The value of a key can be a number, a string, an array, or an object. An array can contain one or more values or objects. With the exception of the vis object itself, every value must have a key.

An example:

"label":[{"content":["The range is "]},{"content":[{"$ref":"start"}," – ", {"$ref":"end"}],"style":{"font":{"weight":"bold"}}}]

This is actually much less complicated than it looks at first glance.

To begin, this is an element label. It will appear on or near the element to which is attached. The label is composed of two parts (notice the array attached to label contains two objects). The first object contains a single key, content, which itself is an array containing a single value. The second object contains two keys, content and style. This content will render values found in the dataset (which I’ll explain later), and has a style applied to it.

The entire graph is contained within an object. Each object type has a specific schema. For example, the data object won’t expect an axis object, but a dimension will. At the same time, some objects, such as style, can be associated with many different parents.

At the top level, there are three essential objects. Without any one of these, no graph will be displayed.

1. Data
2. Grammar
3. Version

The other graph objects include: parameters, legends, legendPosition, size, style, and copyright. Parameters allow report developers to modify the appearance of the graph at run time. Legend and legendPosition control, surprise surprise, the legend. Size and style control the size and formatting of frthe graph. And copyright allows me to sue anyone who visualizations without first paying me a king’s ransom.

RAVE, vizJSON, has gone through many revisions. Certain attributes have changed – features have been added and removed. Version allows the engine to properly identify which version of vizJSON the visualization has been written for, and will behave accordingly.

Data

The data array controls the datasets available to the visualization. Each dataset is represented in Cognos as a separate query. This gives us a flexibility unseen before. Previously graphs could only be built off a single query – necessitating inefficient queries for the more complex graphs.

An example of this might be a bullet or a thermometer chart embedded in a list. There are two sections; the first section controls the scale of the graph, the second controls the position for a notch. In a standard Cognos graph, we would need a complex query to get the red/yellow/green bands and the notch position.

In this graph, we show various bands, a target, and an actual. What’s not immediately visible is the first band does not start at 0. This graph is actually possible to accomplish using standard Cognos Graphs, but it is an ugly solution involving all sorts of trickery. Because it has to be a single query, a case statement is used. Additionally, because this is a master/detail, the score band query cannot be cached, and the tables are queried for each detail graph.

By using RAVE, we can set up two data sets. The first pulls the score band data. We pull score band label, start, and end. If we are using a single score band tier across the entire m/d list, this query can be cached.

The data set looks like:

      {
         "id":"zones",
         "fields":
         [
            {
               "id":"series",
               "label":"abc",
               "categories":
               [
                  "red",
                  "yellow",
                  "green"
               ]
            },
            {
               "id":"start",
               "label":"start"
            },
            {
               "id":"end",
               "label":"end"
            }
         ],
         "rows":
         [
            [0,160,359],
            [1,360,559],
            [2,560,760]
         ]
      }

The first field in that dataset is categorical. In the sample data, it’s populated with red,yellow,green. The rows section (containing the actual data), refers to the sample categories using a zero-based index. Once these appear in Cognos, the report developer will not have to worry about this.

The second data set is to create the dot. A single value can be called.

      {
         "id":"scores",
         "fields":
         [
            {
               "id":"score"
            }
         ],
         "rows":
         [
            [460]
         ]
      }

A quick call to the fact, with no joins, will be significantly faster than trying to join the two queries.

Grammar
Once we have the sample data to work with, the grammar describes the graphs. Grammar is an array, so we can actually have more than one graph in a single visualization. We can control the position of the different graphs – they can be next to each other vertically or horizontally, they can overlap, they can even be nested. Imagine a tree map nested inside the bars of a waterfall.

Inside a grammar we have coordinates, and elements. The coordinates is an object that holds the dimensions. The dimensions attribute is an array of edges for a specific graph. While it’s easy to imagine a two-dimensional graph, what can we do with more?

In this visualization, we have an interval with three dimensions. We have the X Axis (measures, 1st dimension), the Y Axis (the categories, 2nd dimension), and the Z Axis (the series, 3rd dimension).

A graph need not have any axes. While frowned upon by data visualization experts, we can build a graph by showing packed bubbles, encoding a value by size and color.

This graph has no axes – no dimensions. Instead, it’s positioning the bubbles using a specific method. There are a number of positioning algorithms. From positioning or nesting in any number of dimensions, to figuring out how to place a node when there are no dimensions.

The scale of a graph is defined by the element tied to it. A scale always has at least one span, you can add more to show, maybe, a line over a bar.
A dimension is often most useful when we have ticks and labels describing various points on the axis. In the clustered interval graph above, two out of three axes had labels. In vizJSON, each dimension has one or more scales, and an axis line.

There are various settings to control the axis line and ticks. If it’s a categorical scale, such as the Y and Z Axes above, do you want to show labels? How often do you want to show the measure for the Y Axis? In the previous example, the series was encoded by color, so there was no need to place labels.

Now let’s talk about the shapes themselves – bars, lines, circles, polygons, and more. While an interval is not much use in scatterplot, points can be placed almost everywhere. Some seem less obvious. What would you call the shape in a treemap? Or a heatmap? Or the paths between network nodes? A single basic element type can wear many hats.

Let’s talk about a two basic shapes, intervals and points.

An interval will build a rectangle from one point to another. The most basic interval generates the rectangle from the position of the field assigned to it.

Let’s take a dataset:

{
	{
	   "id":"series",
	   "label":"abc",
	   "categories":
	   [
		  "abc",
		  "abc",
		  "abc"
	   ]
	},
	{
	   "id":"size",
	   "label":"abc"
	},
	{
	   "id":"end",
	   "label":"abc"
	}
 ],
 "rows":
 [
	[  0,0,15,22	],
	[  0,1,17,23	],
	[  0,2,16,24	],
	[  1,0,24,34	],
	[  1,1,22,27	],
	[  1,2,26,33	],
	[  2,0,28,43	],
	[  2,1,16,34	],
	[  2,2,18,22	]
 ]
}

Apply an interval element

"type":"interval",
"position":
[
  {	 "field":{"$ref":"size"}  },
  {	 "field":{"$ref":"categories"}  },
  {	 "field":{"$ref":"series"}  }
]

That interval is built inside a grammar with three dimensions. It will attempt to build a rectangle, starting at 0 to the value of “size”, split at the positions for “categories” and “series”. There’s a little more to it than here, there are three dimensions listed, and the graph has the “cluster” transform applied to it.

Interval also allows us to build a rectangle based on start and end values.

      "type":"interval",
"position":
[
  {	 "field":{"$ref":"start"}  },
  {	 "field":{"$ref":"end"}  },
  {	 "field":{"$ref":"categories"}  },
  {	 "field":{"$ref":"series"}  }
]

In general bars should begin at zero. 40 sales are obviously twice as many as 20. But is 40c twice as hot as 20c? Setting start and end ranges is useful when building thermometer graphs. We can use the interval to build the structure, the ranges, as the base for another indication.

Where interval describes a range or area, points usually describe position – with the caveat that size, shape, color can all be modified based on other criteria.

Let’s shake things up, we’ll go with a dataset that returns score bands like I described at the beginning of the article, and another dataset that returns a single score value.

   "data":
   [
      {
         "id":"scores",
         "fields":
         [
            {"id":"score"}
         ],
         "rows":
         [
            [460]
         ]
      },
      {
         "id":"zones",
         "fields":
         [
            {
               "id":"series",
               "label":"abc",
               "categories":
               [
                  "red",
                  "yellow",
                  "green"
               ]
            },
            {
               "id":"start",
               "label":"start"
            },
            {
               "id":"end",
               "label":"end"
            }
         ],
         "rows":
         [
            [0,160,359],
            [1,360,559],
            [2,560,760]
         ]
      }
   ]

With those two datasets, we need to find a way to build the ranges, and put a dot over the correct position.

In this case our grammar will contain two elements, an interval and a point. Remember how the interval can have start and end? This is easy. We can also apply a simple palette, changing based on the series.

               {
               "type":"interval",
               "position":
               [
                  { "field":{"$ref":"start"}},
                  { "field":{"$ref":"end"}},
                  { "value":"35%"}
               ],
               "color":
               [
                  {
                     "id":"_PALETTE_",
                     "field":
                     {
                        "$ref":"series"
                     },
                     "modifies":"both",
                     "palette":
                     [
                        "#BC202E",
                        "#F49020",
                        "#38B14A"
                     ]
                  }
               ],
               "style":
               {
                  "width":"8px"
               }
            },

The color attribute is as aesthetic, basically a conditional formatting. Almost any style can be changed on the fly. I’ll go into more detail on this in a later article. The style here is defining the size of the bar. In this case, because it’s feeding a pixel perfect report, it’s set at exactly 8 pixels wide. The big gotcha here is the “value”:”35%”. In this graph, even though there is a single bar, there are two dimensions. The “value”:”35%” is simply instructing RAVE to push the element 35% down the scale, with 100% being the top and 0% being the bottom.

This alone will create a nice bar. Now let’s get the dot on it.

             {
               "type":"point",
               "position":
               [
                  {"field":{"$ref":"score"}},
                  {"value":"35%"}
               ],
               "style":
               {
                  "width":"9px",
                  "height":"9px",
                  "outline":"white",
                  "fill":"black",
                  "stroke":
                  {
                     "width":"1px"
                  }
               },
               "label":
               [
                  {
                     "content":
                     [
                        {
                           "$ref":"score"
                        }
                     ],
                     "style":
                     {
                        "align":"start",
                        "font":
                        {
                           "weight":"bold",
                           "size":"24px",
                           "family":"Helvetica"
                        }
                     }
                  }
               ]
            }

This will create not only a dot, but a label. The dot is a black circle (the default symbol) with a white border. The label is defined to be aligned “start”, which in this case is left.

This is close to the example I showed at the beginning, but there’s a lot more. In future posts I’ll write about summary functions (to get the beginning of the green range), sorting (so the report developer doesn’t need to sort it in the report), and transposing (so it’s horizontal instead of vertical).

We’ll also talk about parameters, so the developer can choose his own colors, and the bundle definition.

Attached is the vizJSON for the above graph. You’ll need the RAVE customizer which can be found here. Can you figure out how to transpose the graph? How about finding the max start value and putting a triangle under the bar?

vertical-thermometer.txt (860 downloads)

My apologies for not posting for a long time. On February 1, I was hired by PMSquare as a solutions architect. In addition to flying back and forth over the Atlantic, I was busy writing a training manual. It covers JavaScript, local classes, a brief intro to modifying RAVE graphs, and Cognos Mashup Services. Use the contact form if you’re interested in learning more about it. Now that I’ve actually finished it, I can go back to updating my blog.

An interesting problem was forwarded to me. An Active Report needed to have a data checkbox prompt wrap around. In some scenarios there were too many values for a simple horizontal prompt, and the vertical prompts wouldn’t fit at all. The solution is fairly simple, and you can jump to the end of the article if you don’t care about how I found it.

Horizontal radio and checkbox prompts are actually single row tables with multiple cells. Tables are notoriously difficult to reposition with CSS, and there’s precious little in the HTML that we could use to style.

My first thought was we could use JavaScript, but loading scripts automatically is difficult (but not impossible, see Bob’s BI blog). The next idea was to group the members in sets of ten and use a master detail to generate a series of prompts. That had the double whammy of being difficult to support and being absolutely insane (which, to be fair, hasn’t stopped me from developing some other solutions).

Next let’s look at a vertical prompt. I figured it would be built similar to the horizontal, a table with one cell and multiple rows. In fact, a vertical checkbox prompt is actually that.

Oddly a vertical radio prompt is a series of divs.

And each of those divs has a class associated, clsListItem_normal, with it. This makes it possible for us to play with local classes. Normally, we should be able to simply create a class with the same name. Unfortunately some wise-guy in the RS dev team decided to make life difficult. The RS local class gui gives us an error message when we try to create a class name containing an underscore. So we need to get clever.

Currently IE is the only browser that allows Report Studio to work with the system clipboard. So save your report and reopen in IE (unless you’re already using IE for report development, you poor schlub). Remember to click “allow” if it asks you for permission to access the clipboard.
Now, instead of changing the name of the class, cut the class into notepad, and change the class name there. Paste it back into the local class and voila, we have found away the silly and arbitrary “no underscores” rule.

 <RSClipboardFragment version="2.0"><classStyle name="clsListItem_normal"/></RSClipboardFragment>

Now, let’s set the box type on the class to inline, and right margin to 10px, and run the report.

My experiments show that the wrapping radio buttons will continue to work across browsers and platforms. Unfortunately this will not work with checkbox prompts, until they are changed to divs instead of tds.

The attached report is based on 10.2.2. I’m not sure how the radio prompts are built in previous versions. In any event, 10.2.2 is the first version since 8.2 that allows you to actually set the class name instead of just the class label. So you’ll need to use the copy/paste technique anyway.
wrapping-radios.txt (668 downloads)