Tag Archive for: Techniques

Guarding the security of and defining access to data is often a necessary business requirement. Not all users can or should have access to a total data set, so filter strategies need to be applied to restrict what appears to different users running reports. As Cognos developers, the first question we should ask when faced with this requirement is what filter strategies work best for our data and why? Read more

Page Breaking is a useful feature to offer report consumers. However, it’s often difficult to do this if the item you want to break on is dynamic. Here we show you how to do this with cascading, optional prompts while page breaking on the lowest level chosen.

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One of the issues with using text box prompts is the possibility of receiving incorrect, misspelled, or non-existent entries. This allows the report to run and return unexpected data. Recognizing this, a user would have to return to the prompt page to re-enter values into the text box prompt. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to automatically validate entries against some specified rules while remaining on the prompt page? Read more