Produce a collated pack of PDF Reports

[Rutulian]

Hi Cognoscienti,

Has anyone got a good technique for collating a number of prompted reports into a pack?

My thoughts thus far:
- I'll need to keep prompt variables identically named so I can easily create a job and pass the same value to all the prompts
- PDF concatenation/appending looks like it will need to be done with a 3rd party tool, probably Acrobat
- I don't think this can be done within Cognos alone by creating one big report referencing all the component pieces - layout reference doesn't let me grab a whole report, nor does it keep the query settings.

Currently running 8.3 but if you have a solution that only comes into play in a later version I'd be keen to find out what it is.

Cheers all,
Alexis

[Rutulian]

I've noticed while running through is that I seem to only be able to specify either defaults or set prompts individually for each reports, with no option to set a prompt value to be used across multiple reports.  I can understand why this is nontrivial, but is there a way to force it if I obey strict conditions when building the reports?  I'm thinking along the lines of make sure they're all using the same query and parameter name, maybe even building the prompt page off some reused component somehow...  I'm sure SDK would let me do this by basically picking one then string matching, I'm looking for a no-pricey-SDK option :)

For those who are interested, there's an open source library for manipulating PDFs on codeplex with a sample that I think might be the easy answer for building a custom pdfcollater

http://www.pdfsharp.net/wiki/ConcatenateDocuments-sample.ashx