Report Reference Prompts

[dmusson17]

Hello,

We are struggling with developing a plan to create a report booklet that contains 30 or so reports previously developed for standalone use.  Specifically we are having problems with prompting.  We'd like to completely automate the booklet, but as we add report references it seems to completely ignore saved prompt values in the reports or will prompt with the saved values already selected even when we set the report reference "Show Prompt Page" property to No. 

We have experimented with views also, but the report references seem to just use the views as a conduit to the source report and completely ignore any overrides we save in the view.  I am beginning to think we need to make a copy of the reports we want to use as report references and normalize the prompts that are shared across the other report references while getting rid of any other report specific prompts?

The Report Studio user guide is a little thin on details pertaining to report references and I've been unable to fund much else in the way of detailed directions/help/etc anywhere else.   

Thanks to anyone for any advice/insight/etc.

D

[dougp]

What is a "report booklet"?
Are you trying to consolidate all 30 reports into one report?
Have you considered keeping the reports separate and using a job so they can be maintained separately but all run at once?

[Lynn]

What is a "report booklet"?
...

Report references to create report booklets were introduced in 10.2.2 I believe. It can create a single output with content from all the referenced reports combined into one.

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSEP7J_10.2.2/com.ibm.swg.ba.cognos.ug_cr_rptstd.10.2.2.doc/t_rpt_studio_create_rpt_booklet.html

Hello,

We are struggling with developing a plan to create a report booklet that contains 30 or so reports previously developed for standalone use.  Specifically we are having problems with prompting.  We'd like to completely automate the booklet, but as we add report references it seems to completely ignore saved prompt values in the reports or will prompt with the saved values already selected even when we set the report reference "Show Prompt Page" property to No. 

We have experimented with views also, but the report references seem to just use the views as a conduit to the source report and completely ignore any overrides we save in the view.  I am beginning to think we need to make a copy of the reports we want to use as report references and normalize the prompts that are shared across the other report references while getting rid of any other report specific prompts?

The Report Studio user guide is a little thin on details pertaining to report references and I've been unable to fund much else in the way of detailed directions/help/etc anywhere else.   

Thanks to anyone for any advice/insight/etc.

D

Have you tried creating a prompt page in the booklet report that includes all the necessary parameters for the referenced reports? There is also a property for a report reference that lets you specify Ignore or Merge for handling saved parameter values.


EDIT: It works for me on version 11.0.11.

Included report references pointing to two different reports requiring different parameters and without any saved parameters.

Set the report reference parameters as follows: Show prompt pages - No; Saved parameter values - Merge.

Save the booklet and then back in the portal, go to the properties for the booklet report to set prompt values. This automatically produces a generated prompt page for each of the referenced reports so I could select as appropriate for each. Of course these are generated prompt pages so if your reports have a prompt page with a use value different from display value and you show the displayed value via the ParamDisplayValue() function you'll just get the use value.