converting to Cognos from Actuate

[sys2674]

Hi I am  a cognos developer and Our company has requirement where we need to convert Actuate reports to cognos 8.4
Can any one share their thoughts.

It will be great if you can help me with this. I know Actuate produces .bas and ..rod files.

Thanks in advance
SYS2674

[rlp]

We are in the process of doing this ourselves.  Since you mention .rod and .bas files, I assume you are probably using Actuate 8 or 9.  I don't miss the ugly banded-style reports and awkward eRD designer at all.  I pushed to replace it myself.  What killed it for us was the poor hierarchy support.  I don't know if BIRT is any better at that or not.

It has been almost a 2 year process for us, but this fall the conversion will be complete.  If you have a lot of custom Actuate Basic code in your report designs, you may find this challenging.  That has been one of our biggest challenges along with getting people used to dimension models.  Actuate tends to flatten everything out, even our data warehouse sources.

I can create reports much faster with Cognos than I ever could with Actuate.  Once you learn how it works, you will find you really don't need much code beyond query and report expressions and an occasional macro for more advanced things.  I find Cognos reports are easier to modify, maintain and troubleshoot also.

My biggest single piece of advise is to spend some time getting your models defined properly right away.

[sys2674]

Hi Thanks a Lot..You are correct we are using Actuate 9. and to wonder in Actaute 8 we could save report in HTML aand in Actaute 9 we don't have that option. Yes our reports are using lot of scripting.

Can you share how did you approach the conversion.Are there any tools available.I know there is  oracle tool that converts Actaute to BI publisher..it takes the .bas and rod and converts the to RTF and then bi publisher uses the RTF..

Please share ..

[rlp]

We are using mostly SAP BW data sources with an occasional flat table from an Oracle database in our reports, so my experience may be a bit different than yours.

We started with an inventory of the existing Actuate reports to determine exactly which BW queries were used in each.  Most of our reports were based on a fairly small set of queries, so next we setup a Cognos model and imported the main ones.  Once that was published, we started recreating the reports again from scratch (I am not aware of any kind of automated tool that can do the conversion).

We quickly discovered that some of the queries did not work as well with Cognos as they did in Actuate for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the developers were using a lot of Actuate Basic code.  Some of the reports had thousands of lines of code in them, along with hundreds more from libraries.  The custom code mostly fell into 3 areas.

First, there was prompt manipulation.  Code was often added to convert data types, reformat dates into other flavors, compute fiscal years from timestamps, or convert months to SAP BW's period types and so on.

We discovered that Cognos' support for SAP BW variables is less than ideal especially when it comes to what I call "complex" (BEX) variables.  In case you aren't familiar with them, a complex variable can be configured to work in many different filter modes such as =, <, <=, !=, >=, >, range of values, etc...  Cognos always applies the = filter mode.  We ended up having to create new versions of our queries with better variables to increase performance.  Using just Cognos filters for everything did not perform nearly as well.  We do have a rather complex model and large data warehouse.

The second problem was easier.  Lots of our reports had custom DataRow fields with overrides of OnRow or OnRead to compute values and manipulate strings, etc.  Cognos' query and report expressions can generally handle that well enough.  Naturally, really complex stuff should be done on the back end as much as possible.

The third problem was partially our own fault.  Lots of the reports used Actuate's DataBuffer class which you may know allows you to cache result sets to memory for additional processing later.  Some reports recycled the rows 5-10 times or more each time with custom filters and/or code.  We had lots of If-Else-Then sections that tried to work around Actuate's hierarchy flattening issues too.

Our main solution for this has been to leverage the SAP BW hierarchies and learn how to use master-detail relationships.  I love to also place bookmark based drill-throughs on the data for super easy navigation.  Next, consider take a look at bursting, which is also a cool way to break up very large reports.

Well, good luck!