Creating shortcuts in Cognos is a convenient way to access the information you use frequently. Shortcuts point to Cognos objects such as reports, report views, jobs, folders, and so on. However, when you move objects to new folders/locations within Cognos, the shortcuts that reference them turn into broken links. You would then have to go into Cognos and recreate all of the shortcuts to those objects that were moved.
Or, you could conveniently move the Cognos objects within MotioPI Pro in order to prevent broken shortcuts and avoid the pain of having to recreate them. MotioPI Pro performs many different types of actions to Cognos objects in bulk. One example of PI Pro’s bulk action capabilities is the “Move” action feature. The Move action allows you to automatically update shortcuts when you move Cognos objects.
This blog will provide you with the steps on how to move Cognos content using MotioPI Pro and how their shortcuts are updated.
1. In MotioPI Pro click to open the Content panel on the left.
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2. By default, Report is always selected as the object type but you can refine this to whatever object type you would like to move. In this example, we will leave Report selected since we are going to move some reports.
3. Click the Narrow button to open the Cognos Object Selector which will allow you to choose the desired folder containing your reports. (“Sales” in our example).
4. Click the Apply button and all of the reports in the sales folder will be returned. In this example, we will move all of the reports from the Sales folder, but you could narrow it down to only move specific objects as needed.
5. From the available actions icons, select the Move Action to open the Move Options dialog.
6. In the Move Options dialog, click the Select Destination button. This will open the Cognos Object Selector dialog for you to choose your target location. We’ll choose “Quarterly Reports” in this example and then click the Select button.
7. Next, we will select the check box next to “Update related shortcut objects” in the Move Options dialog, to automatically update all of the shortcuts that reference our selected reports.
8. Click the Move button to move the objects to their new location.
9. Lastly, you will receive a confirmation dialog indicating that your Cognos reports and their shortcuts have been successfully moved.
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