Usage of SDK for administration tasks..?

[Ricky@MDPD]

We are consdering getting SDK for the extra administation capabilities that it supposedly offers. Can you please advise if it offers the following:

1- Report statistics (i.e: how many times a report was run, who used it? when it was used last, etc....)

2- Is this possible to use SDK to get a list of users and which group each user belongs to..?

3- Get a list currently logged on users..!!?

4- What else can it be used for..?

Any feedback is greatly apreciated....

[twlarsen]

Hey Ricky

We didn't purchase the SDK option, but we are able to get report statistics and logged on users using the audit database.

Todd

[Ricky@MDPD]

Hi Todd,

When u say Audit Database are you refering tot the Content Store DB? are you querying the DB using SQL? which tables holds what information?

[twlarsen]

No, we have a separate database setup for logging/auditing.  The process is gone over in the Cognos Installation and Configuration guide.  Basically you setup a database and have Cognos send logging to it.  It was fairly simple to setup and we actually use a great deal for report usage and user stats.

Cognos has an audit package that has a lot of pre-built reports that hit this DB.  Personally, I use sql against the audit DB for a couple of reports that I needed that weren't already built.

Todd

[xiska]

Hi Ricky

The support says: There are no more functions in the SDK than in the Program itself.
As I am programming with the sdk and Cognos Script for 9 years I need to say that this is almost but not 100% true.

Q1: Take the audit package
Q2: yes
Q3: Yes, but this can be done easier
Q4: Anything the frontend can do too

The SDK is not a wondertool which solves any question. You will find less than 200 things you cannot do in the frontend.
You use the SDK for the integration of other processes along our knowledge creation, to make and monitor thousands of taks.

Q2 in detail: refer KB 1008113 - Cognos SDK Java Sample to Extract All the Groups and Roles a User Belongs To
Q3 in detail: depending on your security and firewalls you might use the CMTool. Search for it in the installation.

Q2 some steps ahead (as I solved it): I have created a portlet wich analyses a user, group or role and their memberships in other roles and groups and the permissions in the public folder. The output is like the public folder but it shows also who has why, where, how access including super user roles. A tool like this takes 3 days.
You need to know that this one uses no secret functions - it simply collects The user informations, his memberships, the memberships in memberships ... anything you can do manually but much more faster.

[Ricky@MDPD]

Hi xiska and thank you for your reply....

For Q2, how can this be performed manually..?

[xiska]

Hi

here some easy regular ones:
way 1: You can set up a testuser using the same role and groupmemberships. Log in as the testuser and take a look into the personal preferences.
This can also be used for the functions.
way 2: You can set up some content store soap/axis queries to read the namespaces using the cmtools, making a transformation (xsl) of the response to CSV and use it in MS Excel or OpenOffice