Uncategorized

Review: IBM Cognos Insight

| cognospaul

While I’ve got a bit of experience working with the various Cognos studios, I haven’t had much chance to play with Insight. Fortunately I have IBM Cognos Insight, by Sanjeev Datta.

As a in depth study, it is a bit lacking. The book doesn’t get into serious detail about the inner workings, effects on the server, nor does it go into detail about every single available function. That is fine however, as the book is not targeted at administrators. The only load balancing the readers of this book need to deal with are in the laundry.

This book is very well suited for analysts – people who need to actually play with the data, and who need to learn about the tools available to them. As an example, I have a friend who is an internal auditor at a very large port. His days are spent pulling data from different sources into Access and running queries on them. He is not very technically inclined, and has only a rudimentary understanding of SQL. This would be a perfect guide for him.

As a guide, it is split logically in sections. What is BI and how does it help, installing, configuring, importing the data, and the various ways of manipulating the data. It walks the through each step clearing and succinctly, with screenshots to guide the way. (One small complaint though, I read the book on my black and white Kindle, and there was at least one instance referring to text highlighted in color that I couldn’t see.)

The meat of the book is where it describes how to design and use your cube. From building the hierarchy to writing custom members, it touches on each area. It shows how you can build TurboIntegrator scripts, and why you would, but unfortunately doesn’t go into detail. Ultimately this book shows a user how to go from raw data to a complex dashboard that meets the user’s needs.

To the seasoned veteran of Insight, this book won’t be so useful. To everyone else, this book is invaluable and will get them to the seasoned part. When working with Insight, keep this book open and you won’t go wrong.

IBM Cognos Insight was written by Sanjeev Datta, and published by Packt Publishing.

Javascript

Quickie: Referencing the prompt DOM element with the Cognos 10.2 Prompt API

| cognospaul

With all of the nice things in the new API, there are still a few annoyances. For instance, the functions for adding values only work on textboxes, meaning you can’t programmatically add and remove elements. You also can’t easily move things around, or flip switches, or do any of the normal things you would do with Javascript.

Poking through the JS files, I did find a few things that should make life easier. Today I had an issue where I had to make a value prompt to allowing users the choice of viewing the report YTD or for the entire year. The cube has a nice hierarchy for that, with the captions yes/no or the all level for everything (yes, I know the cube could have been designed so that the No choice shows the entire year, this is a post about JS not OLAP so shush). The issue is that the users want to select “Everything” or “Until December 11”. The everything choice is fairly easy, it’s a static choice with the display set to “Everything”. The “Until December 11” is more difficult, the caption should change every day. Instead of altering the cube to put in a dynamic caption, I opted to use another static choice (this way I don’t need to go to the cube at all), and change the option text with JS.

In order to do this, I need to find the prompt on the page. The ID for the prompt itself is “PRMT_N19F64920x0B67C9E4RS” but that looks like it will change every time the report is run, how can I guarantee that I will always be able to access that. Keep in mind that I’m incredibly lazy, and don’t want to spend the time wrapping the prompt with my own uniquely identified div (because then I’d have to keep track of all of the div IDs, and make sure to move the HTML items when I move the prompt and it’s just too much of a hassle). Surely there must be an easier way.

It turns out that you can get the ID of the prompt with the Prompt API:

var acme = {};
acme.getControl = function(promptName)
{
  var ocr = cognos.Report.getReport("_THIS_");
  return ocr.prompt.getControlByName(promptName);
};
alert(acme.getControl('FilterType')._id_);

That would return N19F64920x0B67C9E4RS.

So that means that we can very easily modify the text of the prompt:

<script>
var acme = {};
acme.getControl = function(promptName)
{
  var ocr = cognos.Report.getReport("_THIS_");
  return ocr.prompt.getControlByName(promptName);
};

Date.prototype.getMonthName = function() {
  var monthNames = [ 'January','February','March','April','May','June','July','August','September','October','November','December'];
  return monthNames[this.getMonth()];
}

var dt = new Date(),
    dtCaption = 'Until ' + dt.getMonthName() + ' ' + dt.getDate();

document.getElementById('PRMT_' + acme.getControl('FilterType')._id_).getElementsByTagName('OPTION')[1].dv = dtCaption;
document.getElementById('PRMT_' + acme.getControl('FilterType')._id_).getElementsByTagName('OPTION')[1].innerHTML = dtCaption;
</script>

This will change the display value (dv) and the label (innerHTML) with Until December 11 (or whatever the current date is).

Uncategorized

Quickie: Changing default option in a Select and Search Prompt

| cognospaul

I’ve been somewhat negligent in responding to the comments lately. One of the most common questions appears to be how to change the default option in a select and search prompt.

The following should work for all versions of Cognos.

Put an HTML item before the prompt, with the expression:

<div id="mySnS">

Now put another HTML item after the prompt with the expression:

</div>
<script>
/* Select and search options
 * 2 - Starts with any of these keywords * DEFAULT
 * 3 - Starts with the first keyword and contains all of the remaining keywords
 * 4 - Contains any of these keywords
 * 5 - Contains all of these keywords
 */
document.getElementById('mySnS').getElementsByTagName('input')[5].click();
</script>

The script will locate the mySnS element that surrounds the prompt, generate an array of the input tags, and click() on the one specified. In the example, 5 is selected so it will click on the sixth element (0 based array).

Going through the Cognos JavaScript files, it looks like there is supposed to be a function in the new Prompt API that would let you do it in an easier manner, unfortunately it appears to be an incomplete function, maybe it will be released in the new fixpack.

In theory, you should be able to do something like the following:

var acme = {};
acme.getControl = function(promptName)
{
  var ocr = cognos.Report.getReport("_THIS_");
  return ocr.prompt.getControlByName(promptName);
};

acme.getControl('mySnS2').setProperty( "caseInsensitive", false);
acme.getControl('mySnS2').setProperty( "searchType", "containsAny");

But, as I said, the function doesn’t appear to be complete in this version. Use the other method for now.