Cognos Analytics

Cognos Analytics

Connect, learn, and share with thousands of IBM Cognos Analytics users! 

 View Only
  • 1.  Dashboard sorting by another field

    Posted Fri June 14, 2019 10:59 AM

    Has anyone figured out how to get around sorting Dates, i.e. August 2018, April 2018, Jan 2018 ... in the correct order using a package.  This visualization will have multiple years on it.

    We have looked at 11.1.2 custom sort and that won't work because it only allows for existing values, so as each new Month is encountered the dashboard would have to be updated.

    We see that data modules allows for setting a sort value for a field and if we had a DMR on this package we probably could use that instead.

    They want the Month abbreviation to show not the number, so changing to 201808, 201804, 201801 won't work.​



    ------------------------------
    Jo Marie Sellner
    ------------------------------

    #CognosAnalyticswithWatson


  • 2.  RE: Dashboard sorting by another field

    Posted Mon June 17, 2019 03:18 PM

    Unfortunately,  it is not possible to define a sort rule of that type on relational query items in a FM package.

    You can, however, do it in a data module.  

    The procedure would be to import the FM package into a data module, create tables in the module from query subjects in the FM package, and then to set the sort by property on the query items that you wish to sort.

    Each non-measure query item in the table will have a sort by property.  You can use it to sort the query item by another query item.

    In your case, you want to sort months by their number rather than alphabetically.   If you have a column which has the month number already you can use it as the sort by property.   If you don't, it isn't that difficult to create one using an expression similar to this fragment:

    case
    when [your month qi] = 'January' then 1
    when [your month qi] = 'February' then 2
    ...
    else 13
    end



    ------------------------------
    IAN HENDERSON
    ------------------------------



  • 3.  RE: Dashboard sorting by another field

    Posted Mon June 17, 2019 05:34 PM

    ​When you have a lot of existing packages and reports written against those package it isn't a great solution to have to create a data module to handle sorting on a dashboard.

    Either the dashboard needs to let us set the sort by another value or allow the framework manager package to have the option to set the sort based on another field.

    Since we were working with a visualization on the dashboard and not a cross tab or tab, we were able to force it to sort correctly by using a different field in the color field and sorting by it then overriding the colors output to be the same but we couldn't use a line and had to switch to a column.



    ------------------------------
    Jo Marie Sellner
    ------------------------------



  • 4.  RE: Dashboard sorting by another field

    Posted Mon June 24, 2019 01:24 PM
      |   view attached
    Jo Marie, 

    I like your approach of using the Color By fields and then sorting there.  

    With certain data sources (such as an Excel file), you can also set the "sort by" by right clicking a field in the data tray and opening the properties of the data field in a dashboard.  Then you can select the option to sort by another field (see image below): 


    ------------------------------
    Zachary Taylor
    ------------------------------



  • 5.  RE: Dashboard sorting by another field

    Posted Mon June 24, 2019 05:11 PM
    ​Yeah, if this was an excel file or data module that would work.  Package it doesn't.

    ------------------------------
    Jo Marie Sellner
    ------------------------------