Errors Validating Reports

[vdimarco]

Top of the morning, having trouble validating a few reports.

1. Cognos attempts to validate the report with the server, when first opened or when the "Validate Report" button is clicked.
2. The attached prompt window pops up requesting values for certain parameters, which varies depending on the report.
3. When cancelled, a dialogue box appears saying "The sever prompting has failed. The request was cancelled"

I'm hoping you all can help me diagnose the cause of these errors. It is important because there is otherwise there is no way to validate data item expressions and would be a huge help!

Thanks for your time.

V

[bdbits]

Umm, you will always get that message if you cancel the prompting dialogue. Answer the prompts and click OK (or Finish or whatever it says).

Note that you can use random values, it will not check them against the data source or anything like that.

[vdimarco]

Right, of course. Silly me, that particular error message in the form of a dialogue box will always appear if cancelled.

What I'm try to determine is why the validation window pops up (described in step 2) and what I need to do to get rid of it?

The random value does work, but my feeling is that something in the report has changed whereas it wasn't always asking for this information in order to validate the XML. 

[bdbits]

You have prompts embedded in one or more of your queries. For example, you may have used #prompt macros or ?pMyPrompt? in a detail filter.

Report Studio will always ask you to supply values for prompts when you validate. If this did not happen before, then somebody must have added a prompt. If you don't want it to appear, you will have to get rid of the prompt. Obviously, this will likely impact the functionality of your report assuming the prompt has some useful purpose.

[vdimarco]

Thanks for the reply bdbits. You're right it does result from the prompt macros. I've found that it comes from as a result of no default values being specified.

The ?pMyPrompt? shortcut needs to be replaced with #promptmany('pMyPrompt', 'datatype', 'default')#, where 'default' needs to be one the options specified in the prompt collection.

Thanks for help!

[vdimarco]

Oh, and I did find that if I entered random values into the original popup window, they would  cause javascript errors and prevent even the prompt screen from running. Strange.