FusionCharts Rocks!!!

Been working on a PoC integrating FusionCharts with Cognos and I have to say, FusionCharts really look amazing. With these charts so many of the limitations that we come across using Cognos charts can be overcome. There are some awesome charts/widgets out there like funnel charts that are still not available with Cognos 10.

With FusionCharts, you can even have charts that scroll thus not compromising on the amount of data displayed along the x axis nor the look and feel. There are so may properties that can be set for the chart too. And I think with this you can set a lot of values dynamically like dynamic trend line values. Really cool. But I think the drill through functionality might be a little lacking when we try using this through Cognos. FusionCharts does have a linked report concept that I am hoping is similar to drill through functionality but need to check it out.

PaulM's contribution:

The drill through (clickURL) functionality works perfectly. You can even perform a self drill through to mimic a drilldown.

The trick is to use repeaters not repeater tables or lists with HTML items. Lists and repeater tables insert useless table and cell tags. Text items are wrapped in spans.

There are two ways of embedding the data directly into the graph.

1. You can use the setDataXML() function.

2. You can also use the HTML embedding method detailed here: http://www.fusioncharts.com/docs/FirstChart/HtmlEmbed.html

 

Date Difference function in Teradata

To get the difference between dates in Teradata you do not have to use any date diff functions. Its a simple A - B calculation where A and B are date columns. This works in a SQL query. But when you try the same through Cognos, the difference calculation gets pushed to the Cognos server side rather than being handled at the DB side. To work-around this, use the _days_between Cognos function and then notice that the Native SQL now includes an A - B calculation.
 

Deleting Report Output Versions

The easiest way to deleting report output versions across reports would be to re-export and re-import the reports and unchecking the Include Report versions property while creating the export. This then deletes all report output versions that have so far been created in your production environment for the reports imported. But this works only for Public Folders reports. To delete report output versions created in users My Folders or to delete all report output versions except the last x versions you would need to use SDK.