RESOLVED: How to present Calendar selector dialog within a Dashboard?

[FerdH4]

It looks like the Dashboards section of Cognoise has been slow in the past month.  So I'm bringing my lazy authoring question...lazy because I've not found what I need after a few Google searches.

I have a Dashboard with routine kinds of date data items - mostly DD/MM/YY or YYYY/MM/DD or sometimes with a time slapped on the end like HH:MM:SS.  I'm comfortable parsing the differently formatted fields into things that are generally useful to and intelligible by most Dashboard Consumers.

What I'd like to do is offer my Dashboard audience a "From and To" date range selector but do so by displaying a Calendar rather than anything that's harder to navigate like a pick list.

Anyone have any Dashboard experiences with a filter prompt that looks like a Calendar?

I'm using Cognos 11.2.3.

Thanks much for sharing ideas.

[FerdH4]

I"m having trouble accessing my 11.2.3 environment to play and test with.  However, in my 11.0.13, when I use a date field for filtering, inside of the filter dialog box a Calendar pops up when I click on either of the two input fields.

Um...can't wait to see what my 11.2.3 system is doing differently.

[bus_pass_man]

Things with time slapped on are datetime data types.


What are the data types of the things in question?

What are you using for the data source?  A FM package?  Data module? 


There's a fair amount of prompt functionality which you can model in FM (less so in data modules, especially for dashboards although reporting is better at supporting it).

Which syntax are you trying to use?  The hooks aka question marks or the hashes?

[cognostechie]

I"m having trouble accessing my 11.2.3 environment to play and test with.  However, in my 11.0.13, when I use a date field for filtering, inside of the filter dialog box a Calendar pops up when I click on either of the two input fields.

Um...can't wait to see what my 11.2.3 system is doing differently.

The key to get answers is to translate what's on your mind into words which others can understand. The next thing to do is to mention specifics of the problem/situation so that people can understand your environment/scenario.

That being said, there are Date Prompts in Cognos which can be used in a report and dashboard and they open up a calendar to choose the date.   

[FerdH4]

Thank you both for your responses.  Seems that my 11.2.3 environment will be down for about a week.  BUT, I suspect I did something wrong as you implied bus_pass_man.  I bet I hosed my Created Calculated field expression in some way which then presented itself as a symptom in my date filter prompt.

I am definitely working within the Dashboard authoring this time (rather than Reports authoring).

[FerdH4]

Must have been user error induced because the next time I dropped a date data item into the Filter pane, it automatically opened a calendar.  I'm marking this as "Resolved" - myth busted.

The three databases that I'm working with each have inconsistently defined date data items - like many will be "XYZ Date and Time" and factually contain both a date and a time part.  But, other data items will be "ABC Date" and also be a combo date and time such that the name doesn't really explain the data item well.  In some instances it goes down hill from there with "Start Time" but it contains only a two-digit hour and not a complete HH:MM:SS type value.  Argh.

[cognostechie]

That's what happens when they don't build a Data Warehouse. Seems like Cognos is connected to the databases of your source system.