IBM Business Analytics

Hello all,

Very noob-sauce IBM Cognos report developer (< 30 day) here just trying to learn some of the basics. 

My task today is to determine if a string data type field contains all numeric data as a criteria for including/excluding a row with that data element in the report.  Looking thru the functions available to me in 11.1 I do not see anything like an isNumeric or really anything like that.  Would love some advice.  Thank you!

Please let me know if I should direct these questions to other forums / other sites.  Thank you all for any assistance, guidance!

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Anthony Wilson
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You may get solutions from others, that depend on using a function that a database vendor supports. Be that an 'IsNumeric' type of function or a data type conversion function which can return a specific value when a conversion would fail.

There isn't a generic built in function in CA at this time, but you can use the built in regex capability.

For example, where a definition of a number might be is optional leading sign, followed by one or more digits.

case when occurrences_regex (   '[+-]?[0-9]+\b'  , [REGEX].[CASE].[C1]  ) > 0 then 'looks like a number'    else  'has some non-numeric stuff in it' end

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NIGEL CAMPBELL
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Hi Anthony,

There is a community called "Cognos Analytics with Watson", you should direct your next questions to this URL:
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/businessanalytics/communities/community-home?CommunityKey=6b10df83-0b3c-4f92-8b1f-1fd80d0e7e58

Best regards,

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Patrick Neveu
Positive Thinking Company
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