Hi all, 

wondered if anyone else had spotted anything similar to this, or can think what could be causing it.

We have a lot of reports, with lots of named items in them. Things like query names, conditional style names, object names etc. Occasionally some of these names end up with an extra space in them. For example "Data  Query" or "style 1 ". 

We have noticed that when using chrome 121.0.6167.185 that when these reports are edited, occasionally these extra spaces are stripped out of the report XML. Using the above examples, they would become "Data Query" or "style 1". The knock on effect is that reports fail as some items no longer exist in a report.

This is very sporadic. I can open the report in the same browser session and 9/10 times its fine. Its just the odd time that this space stripping happens.

I don't know if its chrome related. But that's the only thing that has changed in our environment. These reports have been happily being run/edited for over 10 years with no issues with the extra spaces. It's only recently that this has happened. And it's only chrome that has changed.  

If anyone has any thoughts what could be causing it I am open to ideas!

Here's an example. This is the report opening fine. Copying the report to clipboard, and looking at the xml at just a part of it I see this snippet:  

Note the double space. Open the report again and the same snippet is:  

Changed to a single space. And as this is a reference to a Layout Component the report fails.

When this happens sometimes it replaces all bad spaces, sometimes it only replaces a a few of them.

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Marc Reed
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just a follow up on this.

It looks like this is related to v121 of Chrome/Chromium (Edge etc).  When editing reports in these versions there does seem potential for reports to not open correctly.

Unfortunately for us Firefox is now the only browser that is working with Cognos.  Chrome/Edge Chromium have long not displayed Cubes correctly and IBM support has no fix or work-a-round.  Safari has been hit or miss such that we steer our Cognos users away from it.  And 2 weeks ago we got bitten by the new 125.0.1 Firefox release in that all report downloads from Cognos were blocked as untrusted.  Even if you overrode the warning FF would corrupt the file.  Wrecked great havoc with our users till I found a solution in a Reddit thread from over a year ago - there was an about:config setting that essentially disabled scrutiny of untrusted downloads - not great when many of our users do FF for email and normal web activity.  Fortunately Mozilla rolled back that security setting in 125.0.2 but this kind of thing happens far too frequently in our history with Cognos (ever since DecisionStream 7).

IBM has LONG needed to create their own lightweight browser.  It's mind boggling that the ENTIRE user interface for one of their key flagship products is 100% reliant on someone else's app, for a purpose in which the app isn't really designed for, and which they have zero control over the design and future direction of that app!  There are a lot of lightweight "startup" browsers out there that IBM could acquire and tailor it to work with Cognos.  They could even work it such that it ONLY works with Cognos, thus eliminating the need to keep the security up on it for Internet browsing.

Sorry to hijack your thread but your issue reflects a much bigger issue that IBM has needed to address, for years!