Dynamic Prompting & Filtering Techniques
Dhaval Ghody
Software Development Engineer
Karna Patel
Software Development Engineer
Executive Summary
THIS DOCUMENT FEATURES USE OF TOKEN MACROS TO CUSTOMIZE A TEXT BOX PROMPT AND AN INNOVATIVE PROMPTING TECHNIQUE TO AIDE NOVICE AND INTERMEDIATE REPORT AUTHORS. THIS ENABLES REPORT AUTHORS TO PRESENT ENHANCED UI OPTIONS TO THE USER COMMUNITY.
While the discussion and examples will target Cognos 8.2, the technique is also applicable to Cognos 8.0 and ReportNet. It is assumed that the users are well acquainted with Cognos Report Studio interface and terminology.
The white paper gives an overview of these techniques in the following order:
• Customize a text box prompt to accept comma-separated values
• Using dynamic filtering to provide multiple UI options
SOLUTION BACKGROUND
One of the world's largest specialty retailers started using Cognos 8.1 from mid 2006 to support its Strategic Planning solution. It uses Cognos 8.2 BI currently to support all its Strategic Inventory Initiative. Cognos 8 BI is also used for part of Financial Planning development.
Past 2 years has been challenging as well as enlightening for the company. Different projects deployed currently supports 200 users and recent launch of new projects will take number upto 600 users. Users vary from Merchandise Planner to Inventory Management Planner and from Financial Planner to Top Managers.
Currently the company is in process of replacing its legacy systems to new systems which will provide planners new features, flexibility and power to improve planning. All the retailers strive to achieve tight inventory and maximum Regular Price Sale (Reg Sale) compared to Markdown Sale (Discounted Sale) to maximize profitability. This will potentially increase data warehouse and will provide more ways to look at the same data. Most sought after data is at SKU level for daily as well as weekly transactions. It is really...