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IBM Cognos 10 Platform => Cognos 10 BI => Report Studio => Topic started by: globalbear on 14 Nov 2013 08:25:36 AM

Title: Displaying symbols in mail on Iphone
Post by: globalbear on 14 Nov 2013 08:25:36 AM
Hi Gurus,

I have an issue with displaying symbols on Report studio reports on Iphone.

Scenario:

I have a kpi report that shows some indexes and also a circle in green/yellow/red depending of the index value.
Works fine in the computer browser (IE).
I started out with using three different pictures. One green, one yellow and one red circle in .png-format. A render variable decides which to display.

Then I set up a job that runs the report in html and sends it in a mail as an attachment.
In this way the report itself is displayed directly in the mail without the need of opening the attachment. If I would use pdf as format the user would have to open the pdf by clicking on it. Html is better in that way.

I had some strange issues beacuse the report does not look the same if you run it directly in Cognos or if you send it as a mail, don't know why.
However, this took some time to fix but I was able to come around that problem.

Now - when we get the mails they look good in Outlook on the computer, but... When you look at the mail in an Iphone the circles are not displayed at all!

I tried another approach on this. Instead of using .png-pictures I tried the letter n in Webdings. This letter looks like a circle in that font - perfect.
Then a style variable decides the color. In this way I don't have to care about pictures from the web server.
But... The Ihpone apparently didn't like Webdings. I got green, yellow and red n's (the letter) instead of a circle...

Hrmpf...

Anyone that understands the problem and maybe have a solution for me?
Title: Re: Displaying symbols in mail on Iphone
Post by: globalbear on 15 Nov 2013 07:39:38 AM
I found a way!

I used Alt-0149 and got this character •
Then I resized it and colored it red/green/yellow.
Seems to work even on Iphones!
Title: Re: Displaying symbols in mail on Iphone
Post by: calson33 on 15 Nov 2013 10:20:25 AM
iphones have problems showing .png files. convert them to jpeg and you should be fine.