IBM Business Analytics

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  • 1.  Questions about dashboards in CA 11.1.4

    Posted Mon November 02, 2020 10:03 AM

    Hi everyone, 

    I am researching some questions a colleague has about building dashboards in CA 11.1.4 and have a few I can't find definitive answers for so I was hoping I could get some answers here.

    • Is the best place for calculations within the data module? I so far haven't seen any way to create or manipulate calculations within a visualization.

    • In a visualization showing dates, how can I get a date to appear if there is no activity for that date? For example, I want to plot work orders by month for a year and let's say in two months I had no work orders. How do I get those two months to still show up in a column? 
    Thanks,
    Dave

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    Dave Chirayath
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  • 2.  RE: Questions about dashboards in CA 11.1.4

    IBM Champion
    Posted Mon November 02, 2020 06:04 PM
    Hi Dave,

    Regarding where to put calculations when you are using data modules, I tend to keep my calculations on the framework or else in a data set. Really depends on what the calculation is. For example, if theres a pretty broad, repeated use for a calculation then I'll often put it on the framework. If it's more unique to the report I'm authoring, and using a module, then I'll opt to put it into a data set that is wrapped around by a data module. Those data sets tend to me great places to preload calculations and run them in sub second speeds. The UI for tweaking datasets is quite limited in Cognos even though it's basically a dumbed-down Report Studio. You may notice there not as many options for "tweakability" on a data set as when building a query in Report Studio. There's a good article on how to hack a data set to be able to edit it with Report Studio-like capabilities here.

    Your other subject is kind of what I like to called the "left outer join" obstacle: you want all dates, months, quarters, etc... joined on whatever data you've found in Cognos for those same intervals. Ive never found a way for Cognos to intuitively know what values I want for that outer join, so I've often created a query that first grabs, for example, all month and year for the last x-many months from ideally a calendar table or using expressions based off the sysdate/current_date. Then I join the month-year values from that query to the data I want to summarize for those months-years (in your case work orders). 


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    Logan Whitaker
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  • 3.  RE: Questions about dashboards in CA 11.1.4

    Posted Thu November 05, 2020 07:45 AM
    Thanks for this info Logan!

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    Dave Chirayath
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