Drill through reports and prompts on the Dashboard

[cantnos]

Hi,

We are in the process of upgrading to Cognos Analytics 11.05 from Cognos 10.2.2.  All of our dashboards / reports have been developed using Report Studio via FM packages with both relational and dimensional constructs.  We are able to replicate most of our content using the Report module.

However we would like to make use of the new Dashboarding tool.  I know there have been a few promising updates e.g. in version 11.05 we can now use FM packages as data sources.  In saying that i am still not sure if Dashboarding will meet our needs as our current dashboards can get quite complex.  So I have two simple questions to start with, and if anyone can answer I'd greatly appreciate it if you share your experiences:

1.  Is it possible to use 'value prompts' on the dashboard (drop down filters, e.g. 'office', 'department', 'year' etc)?

2.  Can we drill down to reports from the dashboard (hyperlinks with drill through definitions)?

Thank you and apologies if this topic has already been covered.

[Lynn]

My personal opinion is that a better name for the new dashboard functionality would be "Data Discovery". It allows end users to uncover interesting insights quickly and easily as well as organize and present relevant findings in an aesthetically pleasing way. Dashboard content may also be presented in a dynamic way using new Story functionality. I doubt that much, if any, of that corresponds to IBM's positioning, but lack of ability to address more complex calculations and lack of drill through might impose limits on it for some production dashboard use cases.

You can include filter objects on the page by simply dragging an attribute onto the canvas. You can also select an item, such as a bar in a chart or a word in a word cloud, in one widget and have it then filter other widgets. Filtering is possible but not via all the same type of prompt controls as you are familiar with in Report Studio. Here is a link to the user guide which will do a much better job of explaining capabilities and functionality than I have  :)
http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/documentation/docs/en/11.0.0/ug_ca_dshb.pdf

As for drill through, it is a very popular request on the request for enhancement site. The links below explain the RFE process. You will need an IBM ID.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21692679
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=84195

[cantnos]

Thank you for your reply Lynn.  I though this may be the case... that is the new dashboard engine seems targeted at end users rather than developers.  At this stage it doesn't look like it will be able to handle the complexity of our queries as well as well as the lack of prompts and drill-though capability. We could put through a RFE but like you said I just don't think the new functionality is build the purpose we require.  The good thing is we can proceed with our upgrade using report functionality.
If anyone has had any similar experiences they'd like to share, please let me know.  Much appreciated!

[JBCLARK20]

Also new to Cognos Analytics, I'm finding the dashboards to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand they filter data on the fly using multiple criteria and respond very quickly. Certainly faster than active reports. On the down side, they are very limited in the detail and calculation areas. They danger here is that once the client sees the slick dashboard, they want it and expect it to provide real analytics. As a developer, you can not build serious calculations on the dash board so you have to retreat to Active Reports or Work Space. In the meantime Qlik and Microsoft BI are presenting BI tools that allow more in depth analytics on dashboard platforms, so if you have multiple BI tools in your shop, you may end up looking like you made a bad choice when your dashboard can not produce a simple percentage calculation on a chart.

[Cognos91]

Although, the current dashboards do not allow for prompts, however, you can still mimic a value prompt.
Simply drag and drop the dimension/ attribute field that you want the data to be filtered upon onto the dashboard canvas. It will populate with the values associated with the data item (from the database).
The widget displaying the values almost mimics a value prompt. You can CTRL+Click multiple values from this given list of values.
In addition, you can also filter the set to populate only certain values that you know users would definitely use.
The filter functionality is a good feature to use.
As far as the date prompts go, if you have date fields available and use them as filters in a given widget, then it will display whether you want to select a given range based on the date value field. You may not be able to create MTD/ YTD/ other relative time categories, but the filter works for most dates.