Share a page/content between multiple reports

[sulphy]

Hi all,

Despite a number of google searches I've not really found a clear, decisive answer to my problem.  I have around 15 reports created via Report Studio.  All of these reports will have a page which essentially contains a set of definitions as defined by the business. 

The problem I'm trying to solve is that I want to share 'common' content throughout my reports.  So I write once, use multiple times.  If I need to amend the content, again I can do it the once, and it's available to all the other reports.  I can't see any options to link/pull pages from other reports anywhere in report studio so suspect this isn't possible.

At the moment we'd have to edit all 15 reports to make a small textual change for example. 


Thanks in advance!

P

[MFGF]

Hi,

If the shared content is layout (text/structure/colours/images etc) rather than data content (anything like list/chart/crosstab/map/repeater/singleton etc) then you can use "layout component references" to define a standard version in one report and link to these from your 15 reports.  To do this, create yourself a report to act as the master template, and add in all the desired layout content. For each item you want to link to, make sure you define a name for the item in properties (table/block/text item/image etc). Save this report. From each of your other reports, drag in a layout component reference from the toolbox to correspond to each item in the "master" report. In the properties of each layout component reference point it to the original report and the relevant named item in this report.

Effectively what this does is to create a pointer from each of your reports to the relevant XML section in the master report. When you change the master, the 15 others reflect this change.

It's only for layout components though - not data.

Cheers!

MF.

[sulphy]

Hi MF,

That did the trick and was exactly what I was looking for!  Thank you so much!

In case anyone else is looking to do the same I used a rich text control to share formatted content with my other reports.  Below is a link which details some of the syntax you can use to format the text to make it look pretty :o)

http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/cbi/v10r2m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.swg.ba.cognos.ug_cr_rptstd.10.2.0.doc%2Fc_rich_text_item_supported_elements.html