MotioCI proactively versions all modifications in a Cognos environment. This includes changes made in the authoring studios and administration settings.
Today we’ll walk through some of the basic concepts of MotioCI version control by making a few changes to a sample Report.First, let’s examine the history of the Actual vs. Target Sales Report in MotioCI’s Revision History screen. This screen provides us a complete history of the object, showing us each time its been modified, by whom, and allowing us to view the changes which were applied.
We can see from the screenshot above, that there are 7 revisions of the Actual vs. Target Sales Report. Each time a user changes this object in Report Studio, a new revision will appear in MotioCI.
Here is an explanation of each of the columns above :
Type – the type of revision, e.g. modified, added, deleted or reverted
Rev – revision number
Client Ver. – a client editable version number
Major – a flag for tracking “major” vs. “minor” revisions
Date – the exact date and time revision occurred
Author – who made the change
Comment – information about what changed in the revision
Labels – indicates what label the revision belongs to
Actions – available actions for the revision (revert, promote, view, run, etc)
Now that we’ve covered the basics of revision history, let’s look at how MotioCI proactively versions changes to our example Report in these four common scenarios :
1. A Property change (e.g. name, screentip, etc)
2. A Permissions change
3. A Deletion
4. An Edit in Report Studio
Property changes
A property change refers to altering a Cognos report’s properties such as, the language, owner, screen tip, etc. Click on the properties icon to bring up the following page:
Suppose in this example, Adam modifies the Screen tip property of our sample Report:
As soon as Adam clicks “OK” the property changes will be saved to Cognos. MotioCI will immediately notice this event, and will create a new revision to capture the changes. MotioCI inspects the differences between the previous revision and the new revision, and automatically adds the comment of “Changed Properties”. It also captures the fact that Adam instigated this change.
Modifying an object’s permissions is another common scenario in Cognos Analytics. In the same property editor page from our previous example, Adam now clicks on the Permissions tab.
Adam then proceeds to make changes to the permissions for our sample report.
Again, as soon as Adam clicks “OK” his permissions changes are saved to Cognos. MotioCI immediately notices the change to the permissions and creates a revision. The comment of “Changed Properties” is automatically added and Adam is referenced as the author who made the change.
Using MotioCI’s “diff” action to compare revision 10 to revision 11 will provide a detailed comparison of the “before” and “after” permissions.
Content Deletion
Another important version control scenario is capturing the act of content deletion. In keeping with our previous example, suppose Adam checks the checkbox for Actual vs. Target Sales, then clicks the delete button (upper right).
Normally, when you delete an object it is gone forever.
With MotioCI’s Active Versioning you have the comfort of knowing that just because the report was deleted it does not mean it has been lost forever. Just like any other modification to an object, a deletion is versioned by MotioCI.
Notice that all the other revisions for this Cognos report are still accessible. If you wish to undo the deletion operation you can simply highlight a previous revision and click the “revert” button (this puts the revision back into Cognos).
Edits in Report Studio
Perhaps the most common scenario for editing Report objects is from within Report Studio. For the details on how MotioCI versions studio edits, please see our previous entry on Version Control in Cognos Report Studio.
Summary
As you can see, MotioCI provides 360 degree coverage when it comes to versioning Congnos content. In today’s example, we examined four common scenarios for editing a Report. MotioCI’s Active Versioning provides a convenient and effective way of tracking all changes that occur in a Cognos environment. With MotioCI monitoring your Cognos environments, you’ll always know who made a change, when they made it and what they changed.
