[CC8] How to tab with some users seeing a subset of the tab's portlets

[dxwallace]

Can I create a public tab that will contain approximately 10 portlets, but only a subset of the portlets will be available to the users depending on their group/role?

[larsonr]

This really depends on how you want to present to your users.  What are you trying to show on the page- the packages, portal tabs available, reports...?  I would definitely check the user guides on portal tab creation to understand what you are trying to achieve first.  If that doesn't  help , could you post a specific question to your concern.  That may prove to be more helpful in achieving your result in our ability to help with a resolution.

[dxwallace]

You're right, my question is a little general, and I am still playing around with it, so I will continue on and see what I can see so that I can ask some specific questions.

thanks

[dxwallace]

I changed the question above because I know specifically want to do. If I have a Tab with 10 portlets Group A should see 9 of 10 portlets, Groub B should see 6 of 10 and Group C should see 3 of 10, can that be done with one tab?

[larsonr]

I'm trying to visualize. 

I'm going to analyze this five ways:

1st way is you've built this in such a way that this one portal tab has 10 viewers/navigators of some sort on it.  In order to have it hide show the individual viewers would require some SDK work as that is (as far as I am aware) not an out of the box feature.

2nd way is that you have a main portal tab that is actually a cognos navigator pointing to a folder with your ten available portal tabs.  These have security on them which would hide the right ones from the right roles but they can't actually view the content until the user clicks on it or added the portal tabs themselves.

3rd way, you could create a 10-tabbed report conditionally formatted on role (we do this once in a while to create custom navigators without the sdk) to simulate having a portal tab effect

4th way is to use the idea of a report as a navigator but instead have it load 10 different role based iframes that call the reports/folders you are trying to show using the same conditional logic in the 3rd way.

5th way, give them individual portal  tabs per the 10 different elements that correspond to that user.  This is achievable by the SDK and the code is available on Cognos Support's website.

These are some ideas I have tried pending on user requirements.  Example was we needed to clean up Cognos's way of showing Query Studio Available packages.  I wrote a report that based on role will show the right links to the individual queryable  pacakges.  This eliminated the need for telling users that yes they could see a package, no they could not use it.

Hope these ideas help. I'm sorry if I did not completely understand as I am more of a white boarding kind of person.

[dxwallace]

First of all I hope I'm not throwing anyone off by saying "portals" when I should be saying "portlets"

Thanks very much, this does help quite a bit in that I can present some things to the boss in that there are ways to approach. The way they are approaching it now is "wack" in that for every user that is set up to use cognos, they will go set a tab for that user and build up to  10 portlets on that user's personal page. Remember that each port shows only 1 report (this is CC 1.1), and the number of portlets a user will have on his/her tab will vary depending on what they should be seeing - in reality it is "manual hardcoded security". But basic logic that they try to teach you back in school is that you want something that is maintainable from one or as few points as possible. If one of the roles or groups had another report added, it would have to be added to everyone's tab in that group or role.

This would not be an issue if the portlet itself had "permissions", thus allowing me to dictate who  can see it.  I will play around with the permissions of the report withing the portlet and see where that takes me. Meaning, just display all 10 for everyone and set securiy at report level?

Our situation is one of those Business things where they might want the original look and feel of what we have in CC 1.1, which is basically 10 portals, each with only one report. The original scope of my question was how to do this and keep the original look and feel. It seems like it can be done,  but the look and feel may have to change, and thus they might have to decide upon functionality vs. user comfort with the old ways. However, one of the main things behind Cognos was that it was supposed to take some of the workload off developers.