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  • 1.  Two dates in a diagramm?

    Posted 05/08/20 10:41 AM
    Hello,
    I would like to show the following in a diagramm:
    For every question asked, we have the date of asking the question and the date of Answering it.
    I would like to have a scatter plot (when that is what it is called. I mean a point in the diagramm for every question) or any other diagramm that visualises those two dates for every question raised.
    If I just put those pair of dates in two colums of a table and export this to excel, it makes a perfect scatter plot out of it.
    In cognos the diagramm tells me, that the y-axis cannot have a date as a value.


    If I would have a second wish free, I would also like the following:
    on the axis there should be a "complete calendar". By that I mean the following:
    when I put in the many dates of questions asked, now the diagramm only makes room for every input-date. That means, that when we have many questions in january, none in february and then again some in march, the first question in march would be directly next to the last question in january. Idealy the whole year would be spread out on the axis, every day of the year becomes equally much room, regardless of wether there were none, one or many questions. With more then one question asked on a certain day it would just mean, that there are more points above each other (depending on when we answer them).

    Hope this makes sense to you and someone could answer these questions
    regards

    ------------------------------
    Ludwig Leijten
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    #CognosAnalyticswithWatson


  • 2.  RE: Two dates in a diagramm?

    Posted 05/11/20 03:05 AM
    Edited by System Admin 01/20/23 04:34 PM
    Hi Ludwig

    I just tested the Scatter viz in 11.1.6 with 2 dates - it comes out as expected... so not sure what's the problem with your installation - what version are you using? If you could post a similar screenshot so we can see the dates and what's happening.

    For your second question - today, you would need to add "all dates" to force it to show all dates, but it's something we are looking at in upcoming versions. Please add an idea here, so we can capture interest for it IBM Data & AI

    Thanks!

    Torben

    ------------------------------
    Torben Noer
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  • 3.  RE: Two dates in a diagramm?

    Posted 05/11/20 06:05 AM
    Hello Torben,
    We are using Version 11.0.13.1. Not that old, apparently not the newest version either.
    If I just throw the two dates on the dashboard, Cognos suggests a list.
    If I force it to use a Scatter plot, it shows me just one point, as it counts all the different dates together:

    I haven't found a way, to get Cognos to not count them together.

    If I try it differently, I can use a line Diagramm to give me the following Diagramm:
    instead of a Date on the Y-axis I had to compute the difference between the two dates and put that on the Y-axis.
    It more or less works, but it is a hassle and in my opinion, far from perfect.

    Would be swell, if you could help


    ------------------------------
    Ludwig Leijten
    ------------------------------



  • 4.  RE: Two dates in a diagramm?

    Posted 05/11/20 06:45 AM
    It might not be that long ago... but 11.0.13 is now more than 1½ years old and we had 6 releases since then... Specially the jump from 11.0 to 11.1 was a big step forward in terms of functionality in the dashboards.... any chance you can get it upgraded? It would also help you in many other areas of the dashboard...
    Try out the latest version in the free trial on https://www.ibm.com/account/reg/signup?formid=urx-34710
    For the scatter. it seems to be a limitation in 11.0 - even if I change the aggregation to none, it still forces it on in the Scatter vizualization.

    Torben

    ------------------------------
    Torben Noer
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  • 5.  RE: Two dates in a diagramm?

    Posted 05/11/20 07:49 AM
    Thanks for the answer, online it indeed seems to work as I expected.
    So I have to ask my service-provider, to update  cognos. Annoying, that he doesn't do that himself, good to learn about it.

    Regards

    ------------------------------
    Ludwig Leijten
    ------------------------------



  • 6.  RE: Two dates in a diagramm?

    Posted 05/12/20 08:24 PM
    Regardless of which technique (or tool in most cases) that you use here, you will still run into issues if your date attribute is tied to your fact, or transaction, source.  It is almost certain that even with a nice date dimension table in your underlying source, it is joined on a inner join to the facts, so your queries are conditioned to only return dates on which there are transactions.  In order to fill the gaps, your report (or I guess in the case of a Dashboard, you'll need to this in a data module) will need to have a separate query to just pull the dates in from the date dimension (which should have a row for EVERY date, regardless of transaction activity), and then map this via a join to your transaction query using an OUTER join so you get ALL dates, and then use the resulting query/table in your visualizations.  This can be done directly via the query model in Reports, but as I mentioned, you'd need to leverage a data module if the goal is to build in Dashboarding.

    ------------------------------
    Albert Valdez
    albert@intelalytics.com
    ------------------------------