Hiding Left-Most Crosstab Columns

How do you hide left-most columns in a crosstab without impacting the alignment of other objects on the crosstab?

You may ask, why would anyone want to hide columns in the first place when you have the "Properties" property? That's because for some reason on 10.1.1 this doesn't seem to be working under certain scenarios. May be because there are prompt macros in the data items I want to use for drill throughs even though I don't want them on the layout. I had even set them on all possible edges. Once I have this figured out with IBM, I will update on why the Properties property isn't working.

Latest update from IBM on why the "Properties" property is not working in a crosstab against a cube in 10.1.1 is possibly because of a defect.

So as a work-around, I had to pull in the columns and hide them.

Properties that you need to set to hide the columns:

Background Color : White

Foreground Color : White

Font : 0px

Size & Overflow : 0px

Border : 1 pt None Black

Padding : 0px 0px 0px 0px

The only down-side is that when exported to excel you will see 2 empty columns to the left of the crosstab object.

TM1 & BI Integration issues

One point to be kept in mind while integrating TM1 and BI 10.1.1 is that it is best to stay away from special characters in the member names/aliases.

Another huge point that IBM hasn't confirmed yet but something that I am suspecting is that when you have the same members rolling up to different parent members TM1 makes each of those members unique by concatenating the entire path to the member with "^" character in the MUN. And this character causes the drill up/down feature to be disabled on 10.1.1 (not observed on 10.1).

Special characters like "&" in the member aliases not just in the MUN cause the screen to freeze when drill through links are clicked.

InScope Report Function

How do you display a measure with different data formats against different Series elements in a chart? This is where conditional style and InScope report function comes to the rescue.

Requirement: Display a chart with Revenue measured against Product Line members in the primary axis and against web Order Method against the secondary axis. Display Revenue with 3 decimal places against Product Lines and 2 decimal places against Web order method.

This requirement can be extended to display different data formats against different series members.

Solution:

Step 1: Create the chart with Revenue as the default measure, Product Line dragged into Primary Series and Web Order Method dragged into Secondary Series and Year dragged into Categories.

Step 2: Select Revenue and create an advanced conditional style with the expression as InScope(Web)

Set the format in the style properties for this condition.



Likewise create another advanced condition for Product Line.

Cognos 10 Chart Properties

While I was on the subjects of Cognos 10, thought I will write about some properties of the Charts that are positioned differently between the older versions of Cognos and the newer ones as I don't want people to get frustrated like I did trying to find some properties with the newer version.

The Line Style and Marker properties are now positioned on the Palette dialog box which according to me isn't meaningful.





I had spent considerable time trying to find these properties out that had almost given up with the newer charts and had planned on using the legacy charts and opening a ticket with IBM. Hope this helps others in some way.

Cognos 10 Prompts - New Features

As has been pointed out by Ziegenbart in his comments, with Cognos 10, you needn't use any Javascript to modify the value prompt title line. Cognos 10 provides properties through which you can control the first 2 lines of the prompts.

User Contribution [Ziegenbart]:

I've been using the properties of the value prompt itself to either customize or remove the header text. Super simple and no need to use javascript with the disclaimer that there is no guarantee it will work or won't break. (I'm using Cognos 10 btw).

The default selection for the "Header Text" under "Prompt Text" for the value prompt is "Automatic".

Click on the ellipsis to the right of "Automatic" in the "Header Text" property. Change the selection to "Specified text" and leave the text field empty.

The first two lines of the Value Prompt are now removed.

You can also use this to customize what the first line says to meet business needs by entering some text (e.g. "Please make selection")

You can manipulate many of the presentation elements of a value prompt using the properties menu.