Uses of SDK

[jburchill]

Hello everyone,
I was reading some articles on SDK and it mentioned that the SDK can pretty much do the same thing as in Cognos Admin.  So I was thinking why not just use Cognos admin and skip SDK.

So my question is what can the SDK do that cognos admin can't do. 

Also, what do you guys specifically use the SDK for?

I'm just trying to get the benefits of it before seeing if it would be beneficial for me to use.

[MFGF]

Hi,

The SDK is simply a programmatic interface to the Cognos 10 architecture. It gives you access to Cognos objects and methods from within your own code. In theory, you could spend a few months and code your own Admin interface to Cognos 10 using your favourite development language (java / .NET etc) with the SDK, but why would you?

If you want to OEM Cognos as an embedded reporting component of your own application, the SDK is a must. If you want to write utilities to perform tasks that the standard Cognos UI does not support, you would need it too. Otherwise, I guess not.

Cheers!

MF.

[murali999]

Hi ,

Hello everyone,
I was reading some articles on SDK and it mentioned that the SDK can pretty much do the same thing as in Cognos Admin.  So I was thinking why not just use Cognos admin and skip SDK.

So my question is what can the SDK do that cognos admin can't do. 

Also, what do you guys specifically use the SDK for?

I'm just trying to get the benefits of it before seeing if it would be beneficial for me to use.

So my question is what can the SDK do that cognos admin can't do.

Answer: "what we can't do with SDK" , by using SDK we can do any thing , we can play with cognos if you know SDK programming correctly

For ex i will the tasks i have done through SDK:
1. List all the reports in the CS (with reportname , location , owner , permissions , create time , modification time etc...)
2. List all the users who has the CS profiles in cognos with their access permissions
4.List all the Groups and roles with their members
5: List all the schedules with (name , location , owner, scheduled/credential user , schedule time , priority ...etc alll the schedule properties)
6.List all the reports by package , folders , access by group .etc.. etc etc.....

The list continues ..on ..on

now i'am using SDK for migration from one namespace (AD) to another namespace (LDAP) .. etc..


so what we can't do with SDK

;)

[ramkumarbi]

Cognos workspace dashboards cant be scheduled in any formats (pdf,excel). Can SDK be used to achieve this ?..i want to export entire dashboard into pdf format.

[Grim]

SDK Info
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/development/how_to/page565.html

[bdbits]

Not really sure why you'd compare the SDK to the admin interface. You could use the SDK to build apps with capabilities that may be lacking in the standard interface, as was noted by others. It's a bit like deciding between a dresser and a carpenter's workshop. The latter is something you might in fact use to build the dresser, or you could just buy one, or continue using the one you have. If you need extra capabilities, the APIs are pretty full-featured, but just installing the SDK is not going to get you anything. You will have to build the apps.

As was mentioned by MFGF, the other primary use case for learning the SDK and the Cognos APIs is for embedding Cognos, which actually works really well in terms of granularity in what you can pull from Cognos. Even so, you can do a lot with the REST APIs and URLs without needing the SDK, but it is a good reason to dig into it.