Interested in what Cognos REST APIs people are using. I have never used one and am wondering what I am missing. I have looked at the Cognos doc "REST API Reference" and the only ones that looked interesting to me were retrieving capabilities, and users in roles and groups. 

Also, we support 200+ cognos instances from version 11.7 to 12.1. We have a standard implementation for all clients. Currently our implementation is not setup to support REST APIs. But we have one client that is asking about it. He wants "the API for report inventory, automating and running reports while saving them to our drives and shared drives. The REST API will be used to retrieve data, and update modules. The REST API will be a data source.". This client has their own server. They are not hosted at our data center. So technically he can do what he wants. But he is asking us about setting up the REST APIs. Can the REST APIs do what he is listing. FYI - we already have a report that lists all reports and schedules. 

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brenda grossnickle
BI Programmer Analyst
FIS
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The available APIs are very different between the different versions. Cognos 12.1.3 introduced a few more. So there are a few things here.

REST API could refer to

1. Programatically controlling Cognos
2. Accessing JSON data sources

The published API (https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cognos-analytics/12.1.x?topic=api-rest-reference) requires direct access to the dispatcher. If your application is not on the server, you'd need to have a rewrite rule to redirect traffic. https://cognosserver/ibmcognos/bi/api/ would redirect to http//internalservername:9300/api/ Then you could do requests to https://cognosserver/ibmcognos/bi/api/modules to get the list of data modules

12.1.3 introduced the /reports endpoint, allowing you to access outputs in cognos and execute reports. 

If they want to use rest endpoints as a datasource, then they need to use the DataDirect connector: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cognos-analytics/12.1.x?topic=details-progress-datadirect-autonomous-rest-connections

If you're on an older version of Cognos, it is still possible to do it but a little more complex. You can use the unpublished API, which is a little more dangerous long term as IBM may make changes to those without notice.

I've had a few projects where I've made applications that will log into Cognos with an API key, execute reports and save the outputs into specific folders. Feel free to email me and I can share some of what I've done.

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Paul Mendelson Product Manager
Product Manager
PMsquare
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