moving packages after publishing

[ry1633]

Hi all,

Is it OK to move packages and reports to different locations (drives or folders) after you've published them?  I have packages that I've developed and been practicing on that I'd like to move to a production folder for reports so I won't have to re-build an entire report and package.

[Michael75]

Just to be clear, you're talking about moving reports and packages within the same Cognos instance, right?

I ask this rather obvious question because normally, reports & FM packages are developed in a Dev environment, then promoted to the Prod environment via a content deployment. This is a tried and tested routine which many people here have done umpteen times  :)   Simply put, a deployment is a copy of Cognos content from one environment to another.

Hovever, you're talking about moving rather than copying, which is a bit unclear. And you mention drives (do you really mean drives like D:/ or E:/ ???). These shouldn't be a consideration for a Cognos developer, because such low-level details are taken care of in the configuration of your Cognos instance(s), which for current purposes you can consider as an abstraction layer.

If your question is about maintaining links between reports and published packages, that's a whole new kettle of worms, which we can discuss.

Some more details on the configuration of your instance(s), and on what you're really trying to do would be helpful!

[ry1633]

Well, I'm not sure exactly and it's part ignorance (because I'm less than a year into working with Cognos) and I'm also not quite to the point where my organization's stuff is in production yet.

In our Cognos environment I made a sub-folder called "practice" where I've been working on sample reports with ones that our users have already given me in spreadsheet form.   I've also made a "production" folder for when we start to go live.    These are artificial designations (at least I think...) because the entire instance is a our prod environment.

For clarification,  copying from one folder to the next is what I meant to say, and will the links between a package and a report still function when I copy them (obviously both together) to a different folder location?

[Michael75]

I'm also not quite to the point where my organization's stuff is in production yet.

Thanks, this makes your set-up a lot clearer  :)

Once your Cognos reporting is up & running, you really should have both Dev & Prod Cognos environments (some would add QA or UAT to this list), because this will let you develop and test changes not only to reports, but also to FM packages, data source connections etc. without impacting your Prod Cognos environment. It's also essential for testing prior to migration to a new version of Cognos. But let us not get ahead of ourselves  ;D

Let's say you've developed report X against package Sales in folder Public Folders > Dev > Sales > RY1633, and you then  copy your package to Public Folders > QA > Sales. Note that, whatever folder you move / copy report X to, it will still refer to the original package - the one against which it was created. This is one of the many properties held in the report definition in the Content Store.

But now you want X to refer to the package in Public Folders > QA > Sales. It's quite straightforward. In the Source pane in the top left of your Report Studio, the first icon (two interconnected blue folders) is Change Report Package. Use this to navigate to the location of the new package you want to report to refer to. Once you've done this, checks will be carried out to validate your report against the new package. You might be prompted to validate the report if the package publication timestamp is more recent than the report save timestamp, or if unlucky you might get errors concerning incompatibilities between the two.

Hope this explanation is clear, and post back if you have any questions.

[ry1633]

Also, when I publish the packages if I enable Model Versioning and publish a new package with the same name?   I've also been told that most people turn off "Enable Model Versioning" when they publish a package.

I ask because sometimes I've done that - publish a new package with some tweaks and use it in the same report (that used the old package with the old name).

[Michael75]

Yes, I realise now that we two had a previous discussion about "Enable Model Versioning" here: http://www.cognoise.com/index.php?topic=27866.0, which finished inconclusively.

I'll bump that post to try to get the opinion of the real brains on Cognoise :)

[ry1633]

thanks starting to make sense of things slowly but surely.     I mentioned earlier that I made 2 folders in my instance "Practice" and "Production"   mostly just arbitrary instances so I can keep things separate organizationally.   If I were to copy a package and report from one folder to another, can I expect it to work straight-away if I opened it up in Report Studio or Workspace?   (sorry if these questions might seem trite.  I'm still new enough to Cognos where I'm not sure what to ask and how to ask it )  :)   Many thanks for sticking with me.

[Lynn]

I think you want to look into using a deployment archive which is an administrative function.

If you create a report pointing to packageX located in Public>Practice and then copy that report elsewhere it is still going to point to packageX in Public>Practice. It doesn't matter if you also copy packageX. In this situation you'd have to open the report (or the report properties) to re-point the package to the copy in another location.

If, however, you create a deployment export (kind of like a zip file) of the contents within your Practice folder and then perform an import of that content to your Production folder it will make a copy of the report and the package with the desired connection in place. In other words you'll get a report in your Production folder pointing to packageX in Public>Production.

I am sure there are better explanations of deployment archives out there somewhere  :)