Is there a way to freeze the sliding panes?

[Ridiculon]

Hi!
I am working on a rather large project with several testing/production instances of Cognos Analytics, in the process of moving report specs between instances we have to do a final check of each report being moved. While the new sliding pane navigation system is very nice to look at and use the sliding animation itself is becoming a significant time sink when I have to run 100+ reports in a row (prefereably as quickly as possible). Is there any way to freeze the panes in an "open" position in between report runs? I know it remembers your last position already, i would just like to cut out the opening animation.

Thanks!

[zakatak]

Can you explain more? This sounds like an opportunity to use the IBM Cognos Lifecycle Manager; running the same report in different instances and comparing the output.

[Ridiculon]

What is Lifecycle Manager? I am having trouble finding a description.

We have several testing and development environments (and associated datasources) set up to run cognos. When we move reports from a dev environment to a testing environment we go through all the reports and check them one by one to make sure they migrated successfully (or to make sure they run at all if we are doing a version upgrade). If Lifecycle Manager can help with that then I am very interested haha.

[zakatak]

I think you might want to carve out some time to try out LifeCycle Manager then.

LifeCycle Manager is a tool to automate testing, at least some. It can be used to run benchmarks or compare output between environments. As the user of LCM, I configured it to access one of my Cognos servers. Then I started a set of tests and browsed through my server. I picked a report, specified the prompt values I wanted, and then ran the test. The result is LCM telling me exactly how long it took to run the report. I can run this test whenever I want to now, with the saved prompt values from before.

When I run a comparison, LCM generates screenshots of the report from each environment and compares those with each other looking for differences.

The installer is actually the Cognos installer, just a different radio button near the beginning of the installation. It doesn't have to be installed on the Cognos server.

It's not perfect, but it definitely seems handy.