Hello Everyone,
I think it would be interesting to hear a story about your experience working on a project with requirements that were hard to meet or features that are not there by default in Cognos (any not standard Cognos project stories are welcome).
That's a nice idea!
I don't think I ever did a "Standard" Cognos project. I don't think I know what that means. However, there was one requirement I had I cannot forget.
The customer wanted a solution that would allow an end user to distribute a report by email in Excel format, with the headers frozen and some other Excel manipulations done, automatically. There's no built in way to export a report to Excel with frozen headers. One could export to Excel, open it, and freeze panes, but there's no way to do it to the exported report. And what's more, I had two weeks exactly to deliver a solution.
I think I must have pulled an 80 hour week, but I ended up handing over a solution that was accepted. It was based on saving the report to the server, running a batch file to open it and trigger a bunch of actions in VB Script, including the column freeze. I also added a little trick that made Excel send the revised file to the recipients.
I've had a few interesting projects.
One of the ones that stand out. The requirement was to create a data entry page, in Cognos, that would replace the normal Metric Studio screens. There was the user page that would detect the user and set up the page for his scorecard and metrics. Once he's finished, he'd click on the "save and submit" button. A separate admin page was also set up to allow for easy review. The metrics were read-only until the user clicked on the save button. At which point the row in admin would become enabled. Once everything was saved, the admin had a button which would kick off the metric studio process.
Another time the client wanted to contextually render pre-filtered charts when the user hovers over a crosstab.
And many many of my clients have asked for prompts which are pretty or have more functionality.
And finally, one of my first clients asked me to completely redesign the look and feel of the connection. The results can be seen here: http://www.cognoise.com/index.php/topic,4271.msg23874.html#msg23874