[Solved] Concatenate Strings in Headers

[dxwallace]

Since it's probably good Karma to list info that could be important to a novice, here is the text someone had out there to help me solve my problem.

The lock of the report was one piece of the issue, but there was a more general concept which I was not aware of as a novice. The text of that solution is as follows:

In Cognos 8, only fields used by a report object are included in the generated SQL - having them in the query itself is not enough. This is, evidently, one of the improvements aimed at increasing speed in C8.

The error(s) you will see may include:

RSV-VAL-0002 Invalid Expression [query].[dataitem].
CRX-API-0005 An error on or around the position '0'. The variable named '[query].[dataitem]' is invalid.
In order to include the fields (to make them a valid expression), you must set them as properties of the report object's query. For example, if the Invalid Expression is within a list object, select the list object, and under the Data section of Properties, there is a Properties property entry (as well as entries for Grouping & Sorting, Query, Rows Per Page, Master Detail Relationships). Yes, there are two different things called Properties, and you want the one that is under the Data group. If you edit the Data \ Properties, it will show a list of all data items in the query. You should click all the data items that are not working. If you click all the data items for the query, there will probably be a performance hit.

If the Invalid Expression is in a page header or footer, you must first associate the query with the Page, and then you can set Properties to include the data items you want to display in the Report Header / Footer. Since you can only have one query associated with the page, you will need to put all the data items you want on the page header / footer into a single query...