Advice about the best solution for project...Any Thoughts??

[Amant]

Hi, hope everyone's well.

I'm new to the reportnet world so please bear with me. I have been presented with a project which involves analysis regarding our corporate "customers" and "products" with multiple navigation routes to the facts.

I wanted to get some expert input as to the optimal solution for the challenge.

Basically, the users have requested multi-analysis cube type logic to analyze either our customer base or product line. The specifications require that there is a hierarchical level of reporting for both of the analysis subjects and, at any point in time, different dimensions may be selected by clicking a measure of interest leading to details of that measure. The report must be presented in a crosstab with time dimensions and there are 6 or so levels of "drill-down" or analysis views in total.

The initial scope at a glance seemed to be a solution which would have 30 or so reports encompassing all the different views of the data but I'm convinced there has to be a better way to do this than 30 linked/multi-drill reports. I can only imagine the administration and maintenance nightmare.

One solution recommended was to create stored procedures with parameters for the different navigation paths/levels, thus directing a majority of the work at the back end rather than in Reportnet, and reducing the number or reports to about 12 or so. The data group however, does not agree with this solution stating that there should not be back-end programs created for the purposes of reporting and that the reporting tool should be utilized to its fullest potential.

I'm convinced that that the solution may lie in 2 or 3 complex reports with multiple conditional parameners and crosstabs which "hide" and "show" crosstabs based on a criteria matrix and input from the parent report(s).

Any additional thoughts or opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Were utilizing 1.1 mr2 by the way.
Cheers!

[BIsrik]

At the first point u don't have any drill up or drill down facility as in powerplay cubes or in BO reporting. U have the only option of drill through.

Alternatively u can make use of prompts smartly and display the crosstab or ur report. I feel even by having SP would only help in performance and not in the requirement u wanted. U would have prompts which just asks u which columns to be displayed and which one to hide.

U can also make use of Powerplay cubes (if u have that)..and have a drill through from the cube to the report or vice versa.

And one last point..if u are going for some complex reports..merging many criterias into a single report..u need to make sure the traffic to the report is not much. By traffic i mean the number of users who use the report. If the number is high then there would be no point in merging them as it will take a lot of time to give the output( I assume the data size is considerbly high). If the number of users are normal then merging with some performance improvement could be done.

Srik

[krogovin]

Hi!

If you're using Cognos 8, you should be able to drill-up and drill down but there is another way too..

Again, if you're using Cognos 8, you can use a cube as a Reportnet object.  There is a feature called a tree prompt and the user selects what level of data they want to see through the prompt.  If you use a tree prompt and want to make your report reflect these different levels, you must use the highest level of the hierarchy in your report.

If you aren't using Cognos 8, then I think your best bet will be the use of conditional variables within your report.

HTH

[Blue]

Are you going against production/transactional data or have you created a well defined dimensional (star schema) data mart?

Defined your data properly is the first step to being able to easily create flexible reports in Report Studio.

If you can deliver what your users want in a cube, as this seems to deal with all the analysis questions you have presented, then do that and forget about CRN.

If you can't and MUST used CRN then you can use multiple queries, conditional blocks, user prompts, ... all sorts of gee whiz bang features of this tool to deliver what your users want in a minimum of reports.

Good luck. :)

Blue