It’s been a while since I wrote a blog for Cognos reporting. I'm finally back here again to tell you all about 11.2.1, with many reporting improvements.
Performance improvement for tabbed reports
Report authors can choose to render a report with multiple authored pages as tabs using a property. However, there is a significant difference in how we render the same report in pages vs tabs. When running a paged report interactively in HTML format, only one page is rendered at a time. When running a tabbed report interactively, all tabs are evaluated before rendering the report. This makes the initial report rendering much slower with the same report running in tabbed format vs paged format.
In 11.2.1, a new report property is introduced to change this behavior. Report authors can choose to render one tab at a time instead of all tabs. Reports contain conditional objects rely on page number shouldn’t use this optimized property. Therefore, we added this as a report property instead of changing the default behavior for the product. For details on the property and the global configuration setting, see documentation here:
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cognos-analytics/11.2.0?topic=reporting-performance-improvements-tabbed-reports
Copy values on HTML report outputs
This is an old feature that’s still available in the classic viewer. Yes, it’s so popular we had to bring it back in the interactive viewer.
We are leveraging on-demand toolbar to enable this feature for users. Up on selecting a cell or multiple cells, users can choose to copy formatted data or unformatted raw value.
And if you don’t like this feature, please feel a free to leverage our disable on-demand toolbar option to take the interactivity away.
Batch report performance details
Did you know additional performance details can be enabled when running a report to show querying time and rendering time for each query and each object? This is a great feature that can help authors to troubleshoot or to better understand report performance.
This was only available when running reports from the authoring UI, until now. A new option is available when running reports in background to enable performance details from content navigation. Please make sure to have DISP.zipi.IPAEnabled=true defined in the classic admin advanced settings.
Visualization improvements
A new donut visualization is introduced in Reporting for 11.2.1 along with many properties. This donut visualization is HTML only.
In addition, many more properties have added to other visualizations such as legend symbol options, X axis label orientation and bullet visualization orientation.
Search & Select prompt for data module
The ‘hacking’ days are over (And I'm sorry for that). When using a data module as the source in a report, Search & Select prompt will be available to use.
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