Cover Pages Containing Database Information

[trauschu]

Hello,

Very new to Cognos 8.4 but not new to report development.  I've taken the 2 day intro and 3 day advanced Report Studio classes.

We are converting a large suite of reports from another reporting tool into Cognos.  We have report layouts that are approved ("set in stone") and must be duplicated.

What I am trying to accomplish in Cognos is the creation of a set of cover pages.  These cover pages take in a ReportID as parameter, and then read data from a table about the specific information about that ReportID job when it was created.  So, pages 1-3 are template cover pages that query from a database, and pages 4-xxx are the actual report data. 

Also, every report in this project must contain the same 3 cover pages at the front, so the code needs to be reusable like a template, so that if anything changes in the cover pages, it goes to all objects.

Final output of these reports will be PDF.

I can create these queries as stand alone Cognos objects and pull that data, but when I "Convert To Template" it strips out the database information and stops functioning.  So that doesn't seem like a good approach.

Is there a way to run each cover page query as a separate report object, then run the actual report last, and then "stitch" the outputs together into a single PDF? 

Any other ideas?

Thanks for any info,
Thomas

[MFGF]

Hi Thomas,

For defining the page layout of the cover pages, you could look at using 'Layout Component References' in your template back to a single source report where these cover pages are defined - this would mean that altering the layout of the source report later on would automatically cascade the changes into the reports pointing at it.  It would not take care of the query side of things, though.

Plan B would be to physically hack the XML of the template to add the query references, but the downside to this would be that the queries would end up being hard-coded in each report (ie copied from the template) so changing the original source report would not have any impact.

Regards,

MF.