Dynamically refreshing a report

[Petrus]

Hi,

I would like to find out if it is possible to dynamically refresh a report at a given time period.
At the moment I have a DHTML solution but am battling to find where to put the code.
If any one is able to help me, it would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,
Petrus

[MDXpressor]

What is the criteria for refresh?  I assume the scheduler is not sufficient, so how about
Event Studio?

Let me know what drives the decision to refresh and we can try and build an Event for it.

[Petrus]

Hi MDXpressor,

Thank you for your reply.Ã,  Ã,  I must apologise as I did not check to see what version
of Cognos was being used in the project that I am helping out with.Ã,  :-[Ã,  I took a guess at 8.
It turns out that it is Cognos 7 and not 8, which means I posted my question in the wrong category.Ã, 
I see I should have placed it in the ReportNet Category (I think).Ã,  Sorry for any inconvenience.

... Ok if you can still help me, let me give you some more info.
As I understand it, reports have been created with ReportNet.Ã,  Of the reports show data, and
this is where the refreshing comes in.Ã,  After every 15 seconds we would like the report to refresh
incase the data from which the report was generated has changed, so that the user can see the latest data.Ã, 
The user can just manually hit the refresh button but we would like a dynamic solution.Ã, 

My knowledge of Cognos 7 and ReportNet are almost Zero.Ã,  I have done some web development
and was asked to investigate the possibility of getting a report in ReportNet to refresh dynamically.
Hence I wrote DHTML code that would
refresh a standard html page every +- 15 seconds.Ã,  But like I stated earlier I don't know how to implement
the code becuase the way ReportNet allows you to create reports seems to restrict the freedom one
has in comparison to coding an HTML page.  I am open to any solutions that would yield the same result.

I aplogise again for not geting my act together in my first posting.Ã,  Hmm... I have not seen if it is possible
to change my postings category to ReportNet.Ã,  Well so we learn.

Thanks

[MDXpressor]

Every 15 seconds will put a pretty fair draw on your server cycles.  Having said that, does it just need to run every 15 seconds, or does it need to run every 15 secondss when there is new data, i.e. after a mart refresh?  The scheduler can hand a frequency as high as every minute, but it cannot handle partial minutes.  Having said that, it will not refresh the browser, it will simply deliver the report to 1 of the following options:  Saved to the server, printed, or e-mailed.

The code you have developed would need to be implemented in SDK, I beleive, but I have no experience in SDK; so perhaps an SDK Guru can offer some insight.

[hendrixski]

If you were to add a META tag to your report that makes the page refresh every 15 seconds, and if you publish a new report every 15 seconds you might get it to work.  However Cognos may end up Caching some of the information, so your users may not actually be seeing the updates every 15 seconds, they may keep looking at the same cached version of the report until they close and reopen their browser.  I'm sure there would be a way to disable caching if that were to happen.

The load on that is pretty intensive.  A more lightweight way to do it would be to code your own solution.  One solid night of programming can get you the ten lines of Code needed to send the query to your database through JPOX, and another ten lines of code would get that query posted onto a website every 15 seconds using the Google Widgets Toolkit (or 50 lines of code using AJAX).  This way you avoid the time consuming step of your query passing through the framework model, you avoid having a huge resource intensive process like Cognos running the report, and you make your output in standards compliant HTML so the friendly people using Firefox, or Safari web browsers don't get left out.

[Petrus]

Hi,

I would like to thank you MDXpressor and Hendrixski for your replies to my post.  I have opted to go with using an ASP page that connects to the relevant data base tables, which the reports are generated off.  This is probably very similar to what you were recommending Hendrixski.  So far it looks
as if its going to work.

;)  Thanks again.

Kind Regards,
Petrus