Question

Schedule Cognos prompt report to run with multiple parameters

Asked by: michaeld1954

I have created a prompt report in Cognos which is a line chart that pulls values for a building that will run each day. I have scheduled this report to run and save as a pdf file to a folder on the server. This all works fine but I want to run this report for each building (the parameter) in the query item...there are about 10 in my current database.  I can create 10 different reports...one for each building and schedule them to run 1 minute apart. This works fine...but ideally, I want to create one report and have it run for each building in turn from the prompt list dynamically. This would avoid having to create a new report every time a building is added plus I would only have one place to go if the report needed a change to be made vice 10 different reports. Can anyone tell me how I can dynamically feed all the parameters to one prompt report so that all 10 pdf files are created from one scheduled report?

We are using Cognos 8.4...installed on a Windows 2003 server environment. The reports are created against a SQL Server database using stored procedures as the query subject.  

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Asked On
2009-07-17 at 12:04:55ID24580037
Tags

Cognos

,

Reporting

,

Scheduleing

,

Prompt

,

ReportNet

Topic

SQL Reporting

Participating Experts
1
Points
250
Comments
9

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Answers

 

by: welchb123Posted on 2009-07-20 at 07:06:41ID: 24895102

Hmmmm...   I think there are three possible solutions to your problem

1) create a burst report with a burst key on BuildingID or whatever your key is. (Problem is with the file naming since burst reports are really intended to be e-mailed.  

2) Create a job to run the report 10 times (this eliminates the 10 schedules problem but does not address your other issues.

3) Use the SDK functionality if you have access to the SDK. ( http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=3442&context=SSC6Q3Y&q1=%2bburst+%2breport&uid=swg21339234&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&cc=us&lang=all )

 

by: michaeld1954Posted on 2009-07-21 at 08:35:47ID: 24905738

I did create a job to run several reports together but it appears that only of of the three reports runs successfully. I thought at first it had to do with the prompt values as I had scheduled these reports to run individually with a different prompt value and this worked as expected. When I put them in a job however only one ran.  When I created a job to run with 3 reports (non-prompted) and a prompt report, again...only one report ran successfully.  Each of these reports will run correctly when scheduled individually so creating a job doesn't seem to be working as planned. Of course that seems to be par for the course with everything in this application.

 

by: welchb123Posted on 2009-07-21 at 08:41:39ID: 24905854

Ahh.  I think I know the problem when you are setting up the job you first need to set up report views of the report Each report view contains a different prompting and has to be saved as a slightly different name.   I suspect your job was running with only the last parameter entered.  I have to run to a meeting but I will post more detaailed instructions later.

 

by: michaeld1954Posted on 2009-07-21 at 09:44:26ID: 24906667

Thanks again.
Actually that is what I did.  I have basically the same report for three different buildings. The names of the reports are as follows...I appended the building numbers to the end of each report.  Each report when run individually has a parameter set for the appropriate building, i.e., 1117, 1118, or 1217.

FtCarson_HourlyDemand_1217
FtCarson_HourlyDemand_1117
FtCarson_HourlyDemand_1118

I can schedule each of these reports individually and they will run and save to a folder successfully. But when I add them as a job only one runs successfully.  

I thought about the prompts being a problem so I then took one of these by itself and added 3 completely different reports (that do not have any prompts) to a different job and when it ran...again...only one report ran successfully. It seems like maybe it is only running the first or maybe the last report and failing on the others. I can't find anything  wrong with any of the individual reports.

 

by: michaeld1954Posted on 2009-07-21 at 11:32:39ID: 24907795

Hey Welchb,
I think you are right. The individual reports had the parameters set at that level, but I didn't set them at the job level. Once I did that they all ran correctly.  I still have the original problem that I need to resolve to run these dynamically for each building in the resultset, but now I am able to have the reports run as a job.
I will look at how to use the burst reports option to see if that can work for me but I don't want to email the reports...I want to save them all to a folder with the building id appended to the end of the report name.  I am new to Cognos and trying to learn this on my own so I do appreciate all the help on here.
Thanks,
Mike

 

by: welchb123Posted on 2009-07-21 at 11:54:16ID: 24907992

I am glad you got the job running.  For the last thinkg you want to accomplish I think you have two choices.

1)If you have a license for the SDK you can use that

2) There is a content manager property named CM.OUTPUTLOCATION which causes all saved output file to be written to disc along with some XML descriptor information.  See the article at this link for a utility to rename these files with a more useful user name.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=3442&context=SS9RTN&q1=%2bburst+%2breport&uid=swg21344694&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&cc=us&lang=all

I am not aware of any other options.

 

by: michaeld1954Posted on 2009-07-21 at 15:29:33ID: 31605256

Thanks for the help.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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