We have been using Reportnet 1.1. Tranformer, Impromptu, and Powerplay for a couple of years now, and recently upgraded to Cognos 8. When we upgraded we re-modeled a lot of our datasources (i.e. relational, OLAP, etc.) so that everything is much more organized from a design standpoint.
Most of our data in the business view and presentation view is composite data from different ERP data sources. We recently had a design request from a business partner to delivery a web service for some simple B2B integration. Basically the partner wants to invoke a web service for current inventory of a particular item, feeding the service the item number and the location.
We could go and design this in our Jboss portal if we wanted, but it occured to me that all of the requisite data modeling has already taken place in Cognos 8. Is it possible to expose that modeling as a web service for consumption using their SDK? How?
I think this could be done... I've seen Java applications ask the API to run a query and return the results in XML.. Then the app parsed the XML to get a value and use it for the custom application.
I'd investigate the SDK documentation alongside one of your programmers/developers for more info.
Regards,
Mike