Some proposal for COGNOS application change

Every different reporting tools have their own uniqueness. They comes with different facilities and difficulties. It is always not possible that you can get everything in a version of tool. in every upgrades tools are getting better and better with the maturity of the users are changing.

COGNOS came a long path of changes. They hear customer's voice and upgrade their tools for the convenience of users.

As I got chance to add some value in it, I proposed these below changes to application development team.
This analysis was done on 10.1. Lets see when my demand can be fulfilled by IBM.

Report Studio

Creating Prompt page is not simple. For creation of prompt page you need to create a page and then create the prompt. A prompt can be in the same page but it will show in report result bottom. This supposed not to be there.

Prompt should a popup (active content) not an html page.

Search and select prompt : In search and select prompt the Result

After developing the report we used to run the report to see the data. But if functionality will be there to toggle between raw structure and structure with data that will make the development process faster. Like below.

There should be some search functionality

Value selection in filters:  (There is a workaround but if it comes in place shown in the pic is good)

Report prompt need to hold the last run values thought the session is closed. It is really cumbersome for the business users who run a canned report every Friday with same set of data in different time. He / She should not select the whole list of prompt again.

Framework Manager

Framework should be imported and exported easily from server. In offshore onsite model if the changes is made in offshore an onsite guy cannot check the changes in framework until he get the cpf file. I feel if we can import the file from server, do the change and export to server that will be pretty efficient for round the clock development. Also the governance should be implied like who did what change need to be tracked.

Automatic identification of fact and dimension after selecting the table should be accurate. As of now we have to check all the fields that it is picked up correctly or not.

Auditing:
Auditing a framework is always a pain. searching the names and connections are always a big deal. If COGNOS can provide a well defined tool which will generate the Meta data of a Cognos framework in below format , I believe it will save lots of time of developer to produce the same kind of data for managers and other development team. (This is a suggestion to almost all semantic layer preparatory tool)