I recently had to give a lecture for very basic reporting in 11.1.7 and noticed some stuff people may not have been using before but which may come pretty handy.
Show filters set by user
Cognos added a nifty way to show those filters set by the user via the filter icon (or in the data source via filter item) in the design mode or the running report. This is quite nice, especially when the user is allowed to filter in the running report. The values are also visible in the export.
This works ONLY for those filters you set via the filter icon, manually created stuff won’t be shown (but there will be a caption stating ‘Expression based filters have also been applied‘). You still would need to add those via a layout calculation and do some stuff on your own.
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You can also change what will be shown in the report:
Nice.
Allow simple filters to be changed in the executed report
Let’s enhance our example: We add the country and filter it. Inside the filter menu we can access the settings:
To show the effect I only set (1) for now – the user is able to edit or remove the filter in the executed report.
If we now choose the setting (2) ‘Prompt for values when report is run in viewer‘ Cognos will create an automatic prompt which is shown right before the report is run. Depending on the filter it will be required or optional and the values set in the report will be overwritten.
Disable the interactive tool bar
In the previous version (we used the previous LTS) I had to write some Javascript code to disable the functionality of the toolbar in the fully interactive version. We had to use the new Custom Control UI but a report for which users were not supposed to mess around. Now you can simply disable it:
Change the default values for new elements
Did you ever wonder if you can change those icons which appear when you click on the + to create something new?
Not sure when this was added though.
Hopefully there was something new for you! Have a nice week!
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