Arul's.TEG Blog

IBM has released the new version of Cognos Business Intelligence this week – version 10.2. The latest release contains welcomed updates as well new features across the suite of BI applications. For detail new features, refer a article from ironside group - What's NEW in IBM Cognos 10.2

How do I choose the value to use for the Security > Authentication > Automatically renew trusted credential setting? Answer For IBM Cognos Business Intelligence(BI) deployments that do not implement a single sign-on (SSO) solution, stored credentials used for running scheduled activities can be automatically updated. When a user logs into the IBM Cognos BI application with a user name and password, the trusted credential used to run schedules when not logged in will be refreshed as well. This removes the burden from the end user of having to remember to manually refresh their trusted credentials and may eliminate failed activities caused by changed or expired user credentials. The credential refresh behaviour is controlled by the Security > Authentication > Automatically renew trusted credential setting in Cognos Configuration. Primary namespace only (default setting) : When you log on to the first namespace of your session, if you have trusted cre

Considering your are configuring a cognos on your laptop and need to have a SMTP server.The easiest way to do it is use a gmail account below are the steps for that. To enable that feature you need to have email account, and also have access to SMTP server (outgoing message server). You may download any smtp server, but the easiest solution is to open an account at gmail.com (or any other free email site, witch allow you to use smtp server for free). Open gmail account, and go to the Cognos configuration => Data Access => Notification. Change “SMTP mail server” to smtp.gmail.com:587. In “account and password” field provide your account name like your_account_name@gmail.com and your gmail password. In “Default sender” match email where you want to receive notification, for example your new gmail. Save changes and restart server.

Problem(Abstract) When creating alternate drill-down paths within a time dimension, the drill down paths must be defined so that Transformer can connect them appropriately at the convergence level. In particular, the categories that descend from of the convergence level must be identical. If constructing a time dimension that contains multiple drill-down paths and attempting to connect it at a level for which descendant time periods do not exactly coincide, Transformer will be unable to connect the paths correctly. Resolving the problem Several factors affect the way in which Transformer creates categories in date levels, and therefore potentially limit the ability to connect alternate drill-down paths in a time dimension. The factors are: 1. Whether the drill-down structures differ in type (Calendar or Lunar), 2. How the Year Begins property is set for each drill-down structure, 3. How the properties that affect weeks are defined in each drill-down structure, suc

Problem(Abstract) A Cognos 8 multi-page report output to Excel 2002 will have the worksheet tabs named as <Page1 Name>-1, <Page1 Name>-2,<Page2 Name>-3, <Page2 Name>-4, etc How can the suffix be removed the first page name in each set? Eg: <Page1 Name>, <Page1 Name>-2,<Page2 Name>, <Page2 Name>-2 Environment Excel 2002 Resolving the problem As of Cognos 8.3, there is a new Advanced Property setting to override this behaviour: RSVP.EXCEL.NUMBEREDSHEETNAMES=FALSE Steps: 1) From Cognos Connection, click Launch 2) Cognos Administration. 3) Click the Configuration tab. 4) Select Dispatchers and Services. 5) Click on the Dispacher name. 6) Beside BatchReportService click the 'Set Properties' icon. 7) Click on the Settings tab. 8) Beside Environment Advanced settings, Click Edit. 9) Click the checkbox beside 'Override the settings acquired from the parent entry'

Error : RSV-BBP-0021 when users save big report in CSV format Users are unable to generate Delimited text (CSV) files for large report (500+ MG in size for CSV format). Receive the following error: Failure RSV-BBP-0021 The operation 'getOutput' is not allowed at this time. Symptom Cognos system administrator is able to successfully run and create the report outputs in CSV format. Users can run small reports in CSV formats successfully. Running the large report in HTML format is fine. Running report in PDF format generates different error: .RSV-SRV-0040 Cause This problem is caused by the size of data Environment Windows Resolving the problem Set a big value to CM parameter CM.MULTIPARTREQUESTMAXLENGTH - Go to Cognos Administration - Click System, expand the services

Query Result Definitions (QRDs) are used in a report to request the data as it should be laid out. This means for every element on the report page (list, crosstab, chart) the layout components creates a QRD and hand this over to the query engine. The QRD describes in which format the data is expected from the query engine so to fit to the user requested layout. So it could be that a lot of QRDs are executed and takes resources. The optimization will collect all QRDs and analyse if some parts of QRDs can be reused or equal to reduce work for the query engine and the database. Especially on large reports it is a good opportunity to reuse and pool QRDs. Also, there is no benefit on small and simple reports unless the different elements uses the same query. Its not database specific, It´s used for an internal optimization before sending the queries to the database. Note: In IBM Cognos 10.1 and later releases QRD optimization is enabled by default and this advanced property

Problem : Received error message below when attempted to save to Excel 2007 ppdsweb/source/XtabOutput.cpp(327): CPPWebException: CCL_THROW: XtabOutput::doOutputppdsweb/source/XtabOutputXLSX.cpp(932): CPPWebException: CCL_THROW: XtabOutputXLSX::render() Solution:  Copy the ppwb folder from     <GATEWAY_INSTALL>\webcontent\ppwb to                                   <APPLICATION_TIER_INSTALL>\webcontent\ppwb

When a series of cascading prompts are all required prompts for a data container (list, crosstab etc) then that container can't display anything until all the parameters are populated and submitted. This is not desirable when the cascading prompts are on the same page as the data container. A default value can be specified for the first prompt in the cascade, but since that affects what choices are available for the subsequent prompts defaults for them can not be defined in the same way. Resolving the problem Note: This technique uses JavaScript against underlying report objects in a Cognos BI report. For this reason, there is no guarantee that reports created using this technique will migrate or upgrade successfully to future versions without requiring modifications. Any such modifications are the responsibility of the report designer. Using Javascript, the subsequent prompts can be set to default to the first value in the filtered list of values. To acc

Cause There is no UI for this Answer Steps: 1. Navigate to <LifecycleManager install>\data\projects 2. Locate the project directory in question and delete or rename it

Issue When opening or creating a Framework Manager project the following error message is shown. Additionally, when attempting to create or open a report based on a package is made in Report Studio or Query Studio, the same error message is shown. Error BME-EX-0047 Unable to read preferences for the requested interface. Please use another repository and/or ProjectAccess Interface. Resolving the problem This happens due to a corrupt bmt.ini file in <Install Location>/c8/configuration directory. This issue can be resolved by extracting bmt.ini from last known good backup or even from installation files.

Requirement : For a month to day report, always default the Start Date prompt to the first of the month Step 1 : Create a Time & Date prompt on the prompt page Step 2 : Give the prompt a specific name (ex: StartDate in this example) Step 3 : Drag an HTML item to the right of the prompt as shown below Step 4 : Paste the following script into the HTML Item <script type = "text/javascript"> // Function returns the first day of the month for the current month function MonthFirstDay () { // Create a new variable to store today's date var vCurrDate = new Date(); // Truncate the date to first of the month of this year var vFirstDay = new Date(vCurrDate.getFullYear(), vCurrDate.getMonth(), 1); // Convert the date in vFirstDay variable to a string value var vStrDay = [vFirstDay.getUTCFullYear(), vFirstDay.getMonth()+1, vFirstDay.getDate()].join("-"); // Return the date return vStrDay ; } // Function returns the time entere