We have a situation where we send a running total expenses submitted by employees report to their managers on a weekly basis but they would like to see new expenses that appeared on the report that were not on the previous version highlighted on the report. Any thoughts on how to accomplish this?
Example: Today the manager receives the report for 1 of their employees with 2 expense reports but during today and next week when the report runs, there is a new expense report submitted by the same employee. When the report is sent to the manager next week, there will now be 3 expense reports displayed on the report but they would like to have the 1 new report that was submitted in that time period highlighted so they know that is a new expense report from the previous report they received.
Quote from: gats1527 on 23 Jun 2023 08:31:05 AM
We have a situation where we send a running total expenses submitted by employees report to their managers on a weekly basis but they would like to see new expenses that appeared on the report that were not on the previous version highlighted on the report. Any thoughts on how to accomplish this?
Example: Today the manager receives the report for 1 of their employees with 2 expense reports but during today and next week when the report runs, there is a new expense report submitted by the same employee. When the report is sent to the manager next week, there will now be 3 expense reports displayed on the report but they would like to have the 1 new report that was submitted in that time period highlighted so they know that is a new expense report from the previous report they received.
Hi,
The challenge here is for your report to know what has been added since the previous run. Cognos doesn't update data sources, just reads them, so you're either going to need some way to force Cognos to update a table to flag what was present each time your report runs (possibly using a stored procedure call), or else your data warehouse/ETL tool will need to mark what is new each time the data gets loaded.
Once you overcome this challenge, the highlight part is pretty easy - you can use conditional highlighting in your report to draw attention to the stuff marked as new.
Cheers!
MF.
If you know what time the report report runs you could create 2 datasets. Schedule 1 before the report runs and one after.
You need a unique identities to know if included
Bit messy though
The expense report has a date, right? So how about conditional highlighting for records with an expense report date in the last 7 days?