Not being able to freeze the column header in a list in an active report

[Marvin Falentin]

Hey everyone,

I'm having trouble freezing the column headers in a list in my active Report, it simply won't let me do it no matter what I try.

The list is a really simple one, 5 columns, several rows, I'm using Cognos 11.0.6.

Is using JavaScript the only option supported for doing so?

I'd be glad if you could help me out here.

Greetings

[CognosPaul]

It looks like the new scrollable area height property isn't working in Active Reports. There's nothing in the documentation to suggest it shouldn't work, so this might be a bug/oversight/work-in-progress.

As it's an Active Report, JavaScript should absolutely not be used here. First, open a PMR to get IBM to fix this.

Once that's done, we can do some cheating to get this looking right.

Create your list, then give each column a set width. Make sure the width is set on the column title and the column body.
Copy the list, so you now have two.
On the first list, select the list column body style, and set that to display none.
On the second, select the list column title style, and set that to display none.
Drag in a block, set the width to the width of your list, plus 20px. Set the height to whatever you want. Use scrollbars only when necessary. Set padding to 0.
Drag list 2 into the block.

Challenge to you: How can you get Cognos to use max-height instead of height on the block? This is useful if you want a frozen footer.

Take a look at the attached spec.

[Marvin Falentin]

Thank you very much, I already thought it might be a bug because I checked every available documentation and could not find a single note saying it should not work in an active report.

I also tried that little work-around but I think I made a mistake or two and will try it again with your instruction :) once I tried it I will update you.

Thanks for your help so far!

[Marvin Falentin]

Hey again, I had some Trouble translating your instructions into working order, for some reason the active report will always destroy my format so that the list in the block is smaller in width than the actual list is (even though the numbers are correct). Any idea why that could be ? I didn't have much time to work on this until today so I'll give it another try later on!

Anyway, I had some other problems too, maybe you can give me an insight there too?

I tried to re-create an old stacked-bar-Chart from Cognos 10 in our Cognos 11 active report but it won't let me do several things I could do in the old Version.

e.g. changing the "size" or "width" of the bar itself or customizing the colour Palette.

In Cognos 10 I could adjust the "width" of the bar(s) by adjusting the % in the properties. I'm missing the same Option in the properties now.

I also could create a conditioned colour palette for my stacked-bar-Chart which I don't seem to be able to do now.

One Option would be to just use the "old version" from Cognos 10 but then why upgrade to Cognos 11, right? :)

Again I checked all the documentation available to me and the Cognoise Forum as well as the Internet.

I hope you got some ideas how to fix my problems or can at least point me in the right directions.

Kind regards

Marvin

[Marvin Falentin]

Hey Paul,

I have another issue regarding my original problem:

I did the little workaround you told me and created two identical tables, hid body and header and gave them a fixed width. Unfortunately we got a much much bigger text now than before in one of the cells so it will automatically expand and therefore create a sidescrollbar and kill the formatting in the process.

Any idea how to fix this too?

Kind regards,

Marvin

PS: Sorry I didn't take time to do your Little challenge yet, I'll think about it once I got some spare time.

[AnalyticsWithJay]

Marvin,

An alternative solution is to do this using CSS. Here's how:
http://www.cognoswithjay.com/freezing-list-column-headings-cognos-11/

[Marvin Falentin]

Thanks for your qucik Response Jay!

unfortunately our customers don't want CSS to be used at all that's why I'm trying to figure out how to do it without any CSS..