Text Item appears on every page! {Resolved, sort-of}

[DavidVB]

Greetings, all!

I am working with Report Studio in Cognos BI 8.3, and have run into the following issue:  The contents of text items appear on every page of the report, for both HTML and PDF formats.  I have tried putting the text items in blocks and in tables, but they still show up on every page.  Is there any way to control the page on which the text item appears?  For these, I only want them to appear on the first page where the block or table appears (that is, I don't want them repeated, I only want them to show up once).

Thank you!

UPDATE:
Text item does not appear on separate page-objects, only on all of the 'pages' of a single page-object.  One way to avoid this appears to be to assign each object in the report to a separate page-object, so that text items don't show up next to unrelated report objects (for example, text-item used as title for a list object showing up on pages that don't have any rows from that list object).

[bonniehsueh]

I ran into something like this before where there was a table in the header of the page and I only wanted the table to show on the first page of each page set.

The solution suggested on Cognoise was to create 2 separate report pages, 1 with the table and the second, a copy of the first page but without the table.

Looking for other ways to do this - Can you give an example of what you mean 'assigning an object in the report to a separate page-object'

Thanks for sharing.

[DavidVB]

CognosBuddy11 -

What you describe is exactly what I did -- instead of having one page-object with everything (charts, lists, text items, etc.) on it, I added a couple of page-objects and then re-arranged things, so that each list+related-text-items would be on a separate page-object.  This way, when a page-object spanned multiple pages, text-items that were being used for prompts or as titles for lists wouldn't show up on every page of the report.  The terminology is funky, because a page-object can span multiple pages, but hey that's Cognos.

Thank you.

[k2]

Hi David,
It is possible t stop repeating the text for all consequtive pages. check out the below doc.

http://support.cognos.com/knowledgebase/googlesearch?load_kb_document=1&dr=kb1&uniqueid=125457


Description:

This document describes how a Text Item can be displayed only at the top of a List or Crosstab rather than being repeated on every page.

Root Cause:

By design, if an item is put on a page it is rendered every time you get a new page of output.  For example, if a list or crosstab is given a Text Item title, the title will be repeated with each new page of output of the list/crosstab.

A header or footer is another example; both are part of the collection of objects placed directly on the page and thus will be rendered on every page.

Solution:

To get output where objects such as Text Items only appear once regardless of number of pages of output, it is necessary to use an object that is capable of spanning multiple pages. One such object is a List. The list does not need to represent the actual data you want to display on the report. The list could be a separate query and only serve to satisfy layout requirements.

Follow the steps in this document to learn how to use a list as a layout container in this manner.

The attached sample report demonstrates the final results of following these steps.

Steps:

1. Drag a List into the report.
2. Drag a Query Calculation into the new List and define its expression with a constant (e.g., 1).
3. Click the Layout Unlock toolbar button and cut the calculation's Text Item from the List cells.
4. Click the List Headers & Footers toolbar button and check Overall Header box.
5. Delete the "Summary" Text Item from the Overall Header.
6. Set the Class property of the List Column Body to "None". Doing this clears out the layout list's formatting & shading so that its borders/shading does not appear in the final report output.
7. Drag the List/Crosstab that is spanning multiple pages into the now-empty list cell.
8. Drag the Text Item that should not repeat on subsequent pages into the list's Overall Header.
9. Click the List Column Title, and in the Properties pane, set the Box Type to "None".

Keywords:

hide layout calculation html pdf multiple page

[DavidVB]

Thanks, k2.  I'll have to remember that technique.  It's almost the answer to the problem, but in this case I actually want the list title to appear on every page where the list appears.  The simplest fix would be for Cognos to provide a "title" property on list objects, rather than force people to use these awkward work-arounds, but for now multiple page-objects gives results that are closest to what I need.

Thanks.

--DavidVB