Passing Parameter in Cognos Reports thru External Application

[aryanhanda]

Hi,
I am passing one parameter(Prompt Value) from Java application to one Cognos Report(Master Report).Now when the parameter is passed to the Master Report,Drill down should happen on one column whose values are passsed to the Child Report.There is one more column in the Master report whose values should also be passed in the child report as prompt value of the prompt in the child report
Now I have two questions here:-
1.) If we are passing parameters thru external application ,then prompts should always be kept Optional ,otherwise  users will always direct to the report page thru prompt page which is not right..Is that correct?

2.) Now if I don't want user to see prompt page in the child report then how should I hide it from user ,so that the user will directly go to the Report page.Here I got struck up..
Can some one helps me in this...