Performance Markers in Dashboard

[cognostechie]

Guys:

I have a Dashboard, basically made with Report Studio. I have to insert a line like this:

Products    (^, 1200), (^, 345)

This would be to indicate that the sales for a product went up/down during a certain time period. We don't have license for Metric Studio so scorecarding is ruled out. Is there a way to achieve this? 

Would really appreciate your help.
Thanks
                   

[mikegreen]

Make an expression that uses a CASE statement to determine if it is going up down or neutral, and set a string to a value of what the indicator needs to be - like
case
when value1 > value2 then 'up_arrow'
when value1 = value2 then 'neutral'
when value1 < value2 then 'down_arrow'
end

Then download or make small gif files and save them up_arrow.gif, neutral.gif, down_arrow.gif, or whatever you named them. Put them in a folder on your cognos gateway server that can be accessed by users via http.

Then...insert an image into your list and make the URL an expression that is something like this -
'http://servername/cognos8/images/' + expressionFromAbove

that should make an image URL like http://servername/cognos8/images/up_arrow.gif or whatever image it needs to be called.

Regards,

Mike

[cognostechie]

Thanks Mike ! Really appreciate that.

You mean create a list report and insert an image in the list and then point the image to the gif according to the condition. I am trying that but getting an error:

Unable to support query items from two or more heirarchies of a single dimension..

I will try..

[mikegreen]

Hmmm... The first thing is to get a list and query (for that list) that has both values you want to compare.  Like this:

List:
Col1 (metric name), Col2 (last month value), Col3 (current month value)
HR Metric, 75%, 80%
Finance Metric, 99%, 87%

Then you just compare the last month and current month elements. 

If you are getting that error, my guess is that you dont have this kinda list setup.  You might have to use 2 query subjects and join them up in reportstudio.  You might be able to do a case statement, but I'm not sure off hand. 

If I can get c8 up on my laptop tmrw w/ the go_samples I'll try to make an example..

Regards,

Mike

[cognostechie]

WoW ! Thanks Mike for making so much efforts !

I did insert 2 col for the value (Current Month & Last Month) but getting that error. It's like this:


Product   Current Month   Last Month

Now I inserted an image between product and Current Month . It gets inserted as a col and without applying any expression or condition (just to test) I pointed it to a gif file "C:\program Files\Cognos\c8....cube.gif). The cube came up in the list but when I run it, it comes up with that error.

Let's see. I am still trying.

Thanks again and Regards.

Steve

[mikegreen]

Hmmm... The first thing is to get a list and query (for that list) that has both values you want to compare.  Like this:

List:
Col1 (metric name), Col2 (last month value), Col3 (current month value)
HR Metric, 75%, 80%
Finance Metric, 99%, 87%

Then you just compare the last month and current month elements. 

If you are getting that error, my guess is that you dont have this kinda list setup.  You might have to use 2 query subjects and join them up in reportstudio.  You might be able to do a case statement, but I'm not sure off hand. 

If I can get c8 up on my laptop tmrw w/ the go_samples I'll try to make an example..

Regards,

Mike

[cognostechie]

Mike:

Thanks a bunch ! I got it !! It's working now. 

Just a little problem. Since it's a list and not a crosstab, how do I get it to show the YTD Change value?

I have it like this :

Product             Image Column           YTD Change

The YTD Change is from the YTD Grouped in the Time dimension in the cube. That shows 'YTD Change' instead of the value corresponding to YTD Change. For now, for testing, I inserted another column which is a measure and the image is coming out fine. Do I add a filter to filter on YTD Change? This might be easy and I might be asking a trivial question.

It's coming out like this now:

Product              Image  Col      YTD Change
------------------------------------------------------

Sony Notebook   <Image>       YTD Change    <---- Displaying the text instead of the value

Thanks again,