View data definitions in Report Studio

[kingjamesjob]

I'm an Application Manager recently tasked to support Cognos and manage the development resource team.  I have no development training in Cognos, so apologies on my ignorance upfront.

A problem I'm running into is the lack of understanding by the report developers of data elements loaded through Data Manager.  Developers keep going back to the Data Manager resource and ask him which fields they should be be using in reports.

Even though the developers don't have Data Manager capabilities, shouldn't they be able to view the field properties which would tell them the root data source and whether any transformation expressions apply for a specific field?  I've seen these expression definitions in data manager, I would think that these should be at least viewable by report writers.

There is an exercise now to create an external document with this information which seems silly to me.

Any keywords, etc... for me to investigate this issue would be helpful.