Cognos Analytics

Hello everyone, I was asked to build a Cognos report or dashboard that would look roughly like this (the yellow lines and red text added by me for description and wouldn't be part of the output): 

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Mike Comiskey
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Hi Mike,

as far as I know you can't control and adjust every single property of elements in dashboards like you can do in reporting. That works as designed.
A few hints for the dashboard: You can create your sections with the Repeat (row) field.

The percentage of the individual bars can be set here (properties of the chart):
I'm not aware that you can adjust the thickness of the bars. You could only hide or show the space between them. If you want to force Cognos to show all chart elements (axis, grid lines, etc.) deactivate "Responsive" in the Chart properties. This helps a bit to draw the chart even on smaller screens.

You can also take a look at this extension here for further properties in dashboards:

Additional properties for visualization styling options on dashboards (11.2.0 and above)

Hello everyone, I was asked to build a Cognos report or dashboard that would look roughly like this (the yellow lines and red text added by me for description and wouldn't be part of the output): 

------------------------------
Mike Comiskey
------------------------------

Hi Mike,

as far as I know you can't control and adjust every single property of elements in dashboards like you can do in reporting. That works as designed.
A few hints for the dashboard: You can create your sections with the Repeat (row) field.

The percentage of the individual bars can be set here (properties of the chart):
I'm not aware that you can adjust the thickness of the bars. You could only hide or show the space between them. If you want to force Cognos to show all chart elements (axis, grid lines, etc.) deactivate "Responsive" in the Chart properties. This helps a bit to draw the chart even on smaller screens.

You can also take a look at this extension here for further properties in dashboards:

Additional properties for visualization styling options on dashboards (11.2.0 and above)

Hello everyone, I was asked to build a Cognos report or dashboard that would look roughly like this (the yellow lines and red text added by me for description and wouldn't be part of the output): 

------------------------------
Mike Comiskey
------------------------------

You can get a report to look exactly like that without too much work. As with everything in a report, you can pretty much customise everything...

Use a list for the main part of the report. Then put a microchart on each row to display the value. The chart has a masterdetail to the list, so that the list can pass in the value you require.

One advantage a report has is that the size of the bars are fixed. If you had a filter that just displays a few bars, or hundred of bars each would show the same size. Unlike in a dashboard where the size of the overall visual is fixed and hence the bars can sometimes end up too big or too small depending in the number of data items. (Unless you use the zoom control which is a really nice feature but can remember the size from dashboad close to dashboard open)

The above is quite a common report scenario. To have a list with a microchart representing a value on the list.

A beginner report author would have a data query for the list and a data query for the microchart. The data query for the microchart would query the data and apply the appropriate filter. This is a really inefficient way of writing such a report. The list row already has the value ti display, why not just use that?

And indeed that is how I write such a report. The chart query doesn't query the database. It just has a simple macro to receive a value:

This is the value that is used on the chart. It's just prompting for a value.

The list master detail then does this:

Which is passing the value from the list into the chart.

I use this technique quite a bit, usually passing multiple values through to the chart.

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/businessanalytics/blogs/marc-reed/2024/05/22/more-efficient-report-microcharts?CommunityKey=6b10df83-0b3c-4f92-8b1f-1fd80d0e7e58

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Marc Reed
------------------------------

You can get a report to look exactly like that without too much work. As with everything in a report, you can pretty much customise everything...

Use a list for the main part of the report. Then put a microchart on each row to display the value. The chart has a masterdetail to the list, so that the list can pass in the value you require.

One advantage a report has is that the size of the bars are fixed. If you had a filter that just displays a few bars, or hundred of bars each would show the same size. Unlike in a dashboard where the size of the overall visual is fixed and hence the bars can sometimes end up too big or too small depending in the number of data items. (Unless you use the zoom control which is a really nice feature but can remember the size from dashboad close to dashboard open)

The above is quite a common report scenario. To have a list with a microchart representing a value on the list.

A beginner report author would have a data query for the list and a data query for the microchart. The data query for the microchart would query the data and apply the appropriate filter. This is a really inefficient way of writing such a report. The list row already has the value ti display, why not just use that?

And indeed that is how I write such a report. The chart query doesn't query the database. It just has a simple macro to receive a value:

This is the value that is used on the chart. It's just prompting for a value.

The list master detail then does this:

Which is passing the value from the list into the chart.

I use this technique quite a bit, usually passing multiple values through to the chart.

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/businessanalytics/blogs/marc-reed/2024/05/22/more-efficient-report-microcharts?CommunityKey=6b10df83-0b3c-4f92-8b1f-1fd80d0e7e58

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Marc Reed
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Marc, 
Do you have a link for that dashboard enhancement request? I searched a bit (IBM Data and AI Ideas Portal...) but didn't see it, and would be happy to vote for it.

Regarding your suggestion for using a list and microchart, thank you for that, that hadn't occurred to me. I worked with that a bit yesterday and it has definitely gotten me close to the desired report output format, with the exception of changing bar colors per subcategory - if you know how/where that could be set, please let me know.

Using the added technique of passing a prompt value to the microchart query -- also a cool technique. I found when I took this list and applied the "Section" for formatting, to create the section header look -- that then the values of the measures in the microcharts were not correct (i.e. repeated one of the values), from which I presumed that I'd need to add to the master-detail relationship to make that work. But I paused that work while I consider whether my data set is well formed for this report - I now think it is not. For example, I don't actually have a field that represents 'Category' from my diagram.  So I'm considering taking a step back and creating a data set or data module that would form the data better for this output.
Thank you for your detailed reply!

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Mike Comiskey

Original Message:
Sent: Wed May 22, 2024 02:39 AM
From: Marc Reed
Subject: request suggestions for tool (Report or Dashboard) and techniques for display

You can get a report to look exactly like that without too much work. As with everything in a report, you can pretty much customise everything...

Use a list for the main part of the report. Then put a microchart on each row to display the value. The chart has a masterdetail to the list, so that the list can pass in the value you require.

One advantage a report has is that the size of the bars are fixed. If you had a filter that just displays a few bars, or hundred of bars each would show the same size. Unlike in a dashboard where the size of the overall visual is fixed and hence the bars can sometimes end up too big or too small depending in the number of data items. (Unless you use the zoom control which is a really nice feature but can remember the size from dashboad close to dashboard open)

The above is quite a common report scenario. To have a list with a microchart representing a value on the list.

A beginner report author would have a data query for the list and a data query for the microchart. The data query for the microchart would query the data and apply the appropriate filter. This is a really inefficient way of writing such a report. The list row already has the value ti display, why not just use that?

And indeed that is how I write such a report. The chart query doesn't query the database. It just has a simple macro to receive a value:

This is the value that is used on the chart. It's just prompting for a value.

The list master detail then does this:

Which is passing the value from the list into the chart.

I use this technique quite a bit, usually passing multiple values through to the chart.

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/businessanalytics/blogs/marc-reed/2024/05/22/more-efficient-report-microcharts?CommunityKey=6b10df83-0b3c-4f92-8b1f-1fd80d0e7e58

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Marc Reed
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