***Passing parameters from Cognos Portal Tabs to reports***

[aydakut]

Hi,
Is it possible passing parameters from Cognos portal tabs to the reports?
By performing this we aim developing less reports than intended. Otherwise we have to multiplex the reports for different versions.

Thanks.

[Arsenal]

does this help you?

http://www.ironsidegroup.com/2011/01/17/creating-ibm-cognos-portal-pages-3/

[cognostechie]

I am also looking for a solution to this but that link shows an incomplete solution. It talks about creating seperate  pages (not seperate portals within the same page) and does not show how those pages are linked together to the Prompt.

[aydakut]

Thank you Arsenal but I agree with cognostechie. I am looking for something like tab index property that can be passed through as a parameter to reports which has the counterpart like
?p_tab index? in the report.

[cognostechie]

I found 2 solutions. Not perfect but it will work depending on your requirement.

1> Create a report that has only Prompts. Nothing else but Prompts that you need for other reports.
2> Create your reports. In my case, there are 4 reports . 3 of those use 3 common prompts and one uses a 4th prompt.
3> Create a dashboard page and insert  5 Cognos Viewers. Put the Prompt report in the 1st viewer and 4 other reports in the other viewers.
4> After you select the report for every viewer, click on Edit Properties and in the Prompt Values select Portlets using Channel and type a name in the box below it.

Use the same name in every Portlet. Set the Auto Submit property of the Prompts to Yes. When you select anything from the prompt, it gets passed on to every report and the report data changes.

Another way is to create drill-thru in every report which will drill thru to another report by passing parameters. Create those drill thru options on the top of the report and make it look like seperate portal tabs.