ADVANCED AUTHORING TIPS AND

TRICKS

IBM Cognos 10.2.1.1 Business Intelligence

INTRODUCTION

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September Clementin

Senior Instructor

Senturus

• Join Queries

• Reference data in a separate Query

• Create conditional filters

• Layout Component References

• Advanced expressions

• More Resources

• Q&A

AGENDA

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• Questions will be taken at the end of the demonstrations

• Raise your hand and the moderator will facilitate

How to Ask Questions

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• All demonstrations are based on the standard IBM

Cognos 10.2.1 Great Outdoors Sample package

• These exercises are part of what we teach in our

classroom

DEMONSTRATION CONTEXT

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JOIN QUERIES

TIP #1

• Joins are useful for creating relationships between queries that may not exist in the model

• The Join in the model may not the same as the join you require

• For example, the Model contains an inner join and you require an outer join

• You can create a series of joined queries

JOINS

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REFERENCE DATA IN A SEPARATE QUERY

TIP #2

• Useful when filtering data in just one filter would exclude too much data

• Instead, create one query that filters out the relevant data and then create a second query that references the first query’s result set.

• Filtering Query 1 by the result set of Query 2 will produce a report that shows only orders with a specified product and of those orders only products that have generated a lifetime revenue of over $5,000,000.

FILTERING QUERY DATA FROM ANOTHER QUERY

Query 1

Order, Product Revenue

Filtered to include

Only orders with a specified Product

Query 2

Product and revenue

Filtered to only include products that

Have generated over $5,000,000

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CREATE CONDITIONAL FILTERS

TIP #3

• Provides report consumers with greater data exploration flexibility

• Eliminate multiple versions of the same report

CREATE CONDITIONAL FILTERS

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LAYOUT COMPONENT REFERENCES

TIP #4

• The Layout Component Reference Object allows authors to reference objects within and across reports

• Any Layout object with its Name property populated can be referenced

• Queries can NOT be referenced

• Overrides are available for Parent-Child objects

RE-USING OBJECTS ACROSS REPORTS

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ADVANCED EXPRESSIONS

TIP #5

• Remember that only Query Calculations will give you access to the Query Engine, so

• Best Practice: build advanced expressions modularly from within the Query, even if you don’t plan to display them

Advanced Expressions

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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Senturus Website www.senturus.com

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Q & A