Creating Drill-Through Style Reports using Parametrized URLs

Here's an example of how you can create Drill Through Style Reports using Parametrized URLs against saved report outputs.

Requirement: Create a parent report displaying various Product Lines. Create a child report that displays individual Product Line details. Both the reports need to be scheduled and saved. Users should be able to navigate from each parent Product Line record in the parent report to the corresponding product line child report output.

The requirement to have the reports scheduled and saved makes sense when you are dealing with either huge amount of data being pulled into these reports or being rendered in the reports causing them to run for a long time when run on-demand. Hence it makes perfect sense to have these reports scheduled to be run once a day, burst and saved.

Solution:

Step 1: Create the parent report by dragging in the Prod Line data item.

Step 2: Create the child report by dragging in Prod Line and the other required data items. Set the bursting options on this report to produce burst outputs by Prod Line.

Step 3: Now to create the navigational links, look up the search path for the child report.

Step 4: In the Parent report, create the HTML items as shown below:



HTML Item 1: <a href="../cgi-bin/cognos.cgi?b_action=cognosViewer&ui.action=view&ui.object=/content/folder[@name='Reports']/report[@name='Dim - Parm URL 2']/reportVersion[last()]/output[contains(@burstKey,'

HTML Item 2: Set the source type to Data Item Value and choose the Prod Line data item.



HTML Item 3: ')]&cv.header=false&cv.toolbar=false">

Use the cv.header and cv.toolbar if you need to hide the Cognos Viewer header and toolbar.

HTML Item 4: </a>

Step 5: In the child report, create the link to the parent report as shown below:



HTML Item 1: <a href="../cgi-bin/cognos.cgi?b_action=cognosViewer&ui.action=view&ui.object=/content/folder[@name='Reports']/report[@name='Dim - Parm URL 1']/reportVersion[last()]/output&cv.header=false&cv.toolbar=false">

HTML Item 2:</a>

Step 6: Run and save the output for the parent report. Run and burst the outputs for the child report.







Clicking on Camping Equipment in the above saved output displays the below saved Camping Equipment output in the same window.



And clicking on the Camping Equipment link in the child output takes you back to the parent report displayed in the same window.

You may notice that as you navigate back and forth between the 2 reports, the left side margin space increases pushing your report to the left and scroll bars appear in your reports now. To avoid this use a target="_parent" tag in your HTML items. If folks are interested then I will blog about why this seems to be happening.

Related Articles:

• Parameterized URLs for Retrieving Burst Outputs - Part 2
• Parameterized URLs for Retrieving Burst Outputs

 

Avoid Paginating Saved HTML Outputs

When you burst/save HTML outputs, you must have noticed that Cognos by default paginates the outputs with the default value being 20 rows per page. In saved outputs, this causes sections of the report to repeat down the length of the single HTML page. This can be avoided by setting the rows per page property for report objects.

However, you can also set "Paginate saved HTML output" available under File Menu > Report Properties to achieve the same. This property saves users from having to set a very high value for the Rows Per Page property against each report object.

Parameterized URLs for Retrieving Burst Outputs - Part 2

I had long written about using Parametrized URLs for retrieving burst outputs (Parameterized URLs for Retrieving Burst Outputs). The solution proposed works when your burst Ids are unique across all report versions as was in my case. But what if the report generates the same set of burst outputs each time but with different data and you have report versioning property set to more than 1?

In this case, you need to modify the URL as shown below:

http://< server>?b_action=cognosViewer&ui.action=view&ui.object=/content/folder[@name='TEST']/reportView[@name='TEST REPORT']/reportVersion[last()]/output[contains(@burstKey,'123')]

The "last()" keyword over here ensures that Cognos looks through the latest report version to get the burst output with burst key 123.

Related Articles:

• Parameterized URLs for Retrieving Burst Outputs
• Creating Drill-Through Style Reports using Parametrized URLs