What this book covers

Chapter 1, Report Authoring Basic Concepts, introduces you to some fundamental components and features that you will be using in most of the reports. This is meant to bring all readers on to the same page before moving on to advanced topics. It covers filters, sorting, aggregations, formatting, conditional formatting, and so on.

Chapter 2, Advanced Report Authoring, shows advanced techniques required to create more sophisticated report solutions that meet demanding business requirements. It covers cascaded prompts, master-detail queries, conditional block, defining drill links, and overriding the drill links. The most distinguishing recipe in this chapter is "Writing back to the database."

Chapter 3, Tips and Tricks: Java Scripts, shows how to manipulate the default selection, titles, visibility, and so on when the prompt page loads. It explains how to add programmability like validating the prompt selection before submitting the values to the report engine. A favorite recipe in this chapter is "Generating a bar chart using JavaScript". These recipes open a whole new avenue for you to progress on.

Chapter 4, Tips and Tricks: Report Page, shows some techniques to break boundaries and provides some features in reports that are not readily available in the Studio. It also talks about showing images dynamically (traffic lights), handling missing images, dynamic links to external website (for example, Google Maps), alternating drill links, showing tooltips on report, minimum column width and merged cells in Excel output.

Chapter 5, Xml Editing, shows you how to edit the report outside the Studio by directly editing the XML specifications. The recipes show you how to save time and quickly change references to old items, copy-paste the drill parameter mappings, and introduce you to important XML tags. The most intriguing recipe in this chapter is "A hidden gem in XML—row level formatting".

Chapter 6, Writing Printable Reports, gives you tips and shows you the options available within the Studio to make reports printable as business reports need to be printed and this part is often ignored during technical specification and development

Chapter 7, Working with Dimensional Models, When reports are written against a dimensional data source (or dimensionally modeled relational schema), a whole new style of report writing is needed. You can use dimensional functions, slicers, and others. Also, filtering and zero suppression are done differently. This chapter talks about such options (as dimensional data sources are becoming popular again).

Chapter 8, Macros, shows you that even though macros are often considered a Framework Modeler's tool, they can be used within Report Studio as well. These recipes will show you some very useful macros around security, string manipulation, and prompting.

Chapter 9, Using Report Studio Better, shows you the studio options and development practices to get the best out of Report Studio. It will include the understanding of Studio options, setting time-outs, capturing the real query fired on database, handling slow report validation, customizing classes, and so on.

Chapter 10, Some More Useful Recipes, is an assorted platter of useful recipes, meant to show more work-arounds, tricks, and techniques. A highlight recipe is–"changing style sheets at run time depending on the user".

Chapter 11, Best Practices, shows you how to achieve code commenting, version controlling, regression testing, and so on. It will also show you some useful practices you should cultivate as standard during development.

Appendix, Recommendations and References, covers topics that are very useful for a Cognos report developer such as version controlling, Cognos mash-up service, and Cognos Go Office.