Contact Us
Help Desk

Post: Using MotioCI “PDF Diff” To Accelerate The Cognos Upgrade Process

Locating errors in report outputs can be a difficult and complex task. It’s especially challenging if your Cognos system hosts a sea of reports! MotioCI can journey deep into your Development, Production, and QA environments to fish out error-filled report outputs.

The “Diff” feature in MotioCI will show you textual and graphical changes in your PDF outputs of reports and present them side-by-side with full documentation. The Diff feature compares and highlights changes between different versions of reports so you can assess any textual or visual differences that may hinder the functionality of your reports before you upgrade. This feature gives you a proactive approach for a smooth transition in Cognos upgrades.

You can choose to compare:

  • Different outputs of the same report
  • Different revisions of the same report
  • Versions of a report from one Cognos environment to another environment

MotioCI PDF Diff can be used along with automated regression testing which is particularly valuable when working through the Cognos upgrade process. The testing feature of MotioCI helps you by identifying the report outputs with errors and alerts you to them with email notifications. These email notifications can even be customized to varying degrees of importance, so you can focus on the most important items in your upgrade process.

Here we will demonstrate how to use PDF Diff to compare a report in a Cognos 10 environment against another report in a Cognos 11 environment through an automated approach with regression testing.

Using Regression Testing with PDF Diff

The following is a one-time setup that will utilize the “Output Stability” and “Output Comparison” assertions used in automated testing to monitor differences between two reports.

  1. Navigate to the object in your Cognos 10 instance and right-click on the object that you want to perform a comparison against. Select “Add Test Case.”MotioCI_add_test_case
    Click to enlarge
  2. In the Test Case Wizard, add a name to your test case. Make sure “Enable Execution” and “PDF” is checked before you select “Next.”Enable_Execution-2
    Click to enlarge
  3. Click only on the “Output Stability” checkbox. The “Output Stability” assertion will store the output in Cognos 10 for comparison against the output in Cognos 11. Select “Finish.”MotioCI_add_Output_Stability
    Click to enlarge
  4. You will notice that your new test case with the “Output Stability” assertion is now located under your report.Output_Stability_Assertion-1
    Click to enlarge
  5. Right-click on “Output Stability” assertion and click “Edit” to configure the settings.MotioCI_right_click_Ouput_Stability
    Click to enlarge
  6. In the “Edit Assertion” window, make sure only the “PDF” checkbox is selected. In the “Visual Difference Level” drop-down menu, you can select “warning” if visual differences are not as important to you than the differences in the actual data. This setting will alert you of any failures for data differences.MotioCI_edit_assertion
    Click to enlarge
  7. Right-click on test case and select “Run Test Case.”MotioCI_run_test_case
    Click to enlarge
  8. Now drag this same test case into the Clipboard to copy/paste to your Cognos 11 environment. This will compare how your outputs will behave between the two environments.MotioCI_drag_to_Cognos_11
    Click to enlarge
  9. Drag your test case into the report in the target environment which is Cognos version 11.0.2 in this example.MotioCI_drag_into_target_environment
    Click to enlarge
  10. Right-click your test case  > “Add Assertion” > “Data Validation” > “Output          Comparison.” The output comparison assertion will fail if the output of this report in the Cognos 11 environment is different from the saved output in the Cognos 10 environment. This is a methodical way to identify the report outputs that are changing from your current environment to the upgrade environment so that you can to take action on them.MotioCI_right_click_test_case
    Click to enlarge
  11. In the “Add New Assertion” window, make sure only the “PDF” checkbox is checked        in “Instance Name Prompt.” Enter the name of your Cognos 11 instance, which is “Development” in this example.MotioCI_enter_Cognos_11_instance
    Click to enlarge
  12. Right-click on your test case and select “Run Test Case.”MotioCI_right_click_run_test_case
    Click to enlarge
  13. You will see if your test case has failed or succeeded. Click on the timestamp to view the details of the executed test case.MotioCI_viewed_results
    Click to enlarge
  14. If you have a “Failure” status, click on “PDF Diff” to view the differences between the two reports.MotioCI_view_differences_with_PDF_Diff
    Click to enlarge
  15. MotioCI initializes the diff and displays two images of the PDF output. The left side shows the output in your Cognos 10 environment and the right-side shows the output in your Cognos 11 environment. Here you can see that you do, in fact, have differences in the data from Cognos 10 to Cognos 11.pdf-diff-output-comparision-final_3
    Click to enlarge

Conclusion

As you can see, MotioCI can expedite your Cognos upgrade process by alerting you to important changes from your current environment to the new. The Diff feature of MotioCI saves you the time and effort of analyzing differences in report outputs by highlighting exactly what’s changed between them.

Learn more about using Motio to accelerate your upgrade, click here.

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below

Ready to streamline and automate your BI & analytics platforms?
Get A Demo
Solutions
Services
Products
About Us
Resources
Contact
  • Tel:1 (972) 447-9595
  • Toll Free:1 (833) 855-3073
Follow Us
Youtube Linkedin Twitter
© 2024 Motio. All rights reserved
Scroll to Top
As the BI space evolves, organizations must take into account the bottom line of amassing analytics assets.
The more assets you have, the greater the cost to your business. There are the hard costs of keeping redundant assets, i.e., cloud or server capacity. Accumulating multiple versions of the same visualization not only takes up space, but BI vendors are moving to capacity pricing. Companies now pay more if you have more dashboards, apps, and reports. Earlier, we spoke about dependencies. Keeping redundant assets increases the number of dependencies and therefore the complexity. This comes with a price tag.
The implications of asset failures differ, and the business’s repercussions can be minimal or drastic.
Different industries have distinct regulatory requirements to meet. The impact may be minimal if a report for an end-of-year close has a mislabeled column that the sales or marketing department uses, On the other hand, if a healthcare or financial report does not meet the needs of a HIPPA or SOX compliance report, the company and its C-level suite may face severe penalties and reputational damage. Another example is a report that is shared externally. During an update of the report specs, the low-level security was incorrectly applied, which caused people to have access to personal information.
The complexity of assets influences their likelihood of encountering issues.
The last thing a business wants is for a report or app to fail at a crucial moment. If you know the report is complex and has a lot of dependencies, then the probability of failure caused by IT changes is high. That means a change request should be taken into account. Dependency graphs become important. If it is a straightforward sales report that tells notes by salesperson by account, any changes made do not have the same impact on the report, even if it fails. BI operations should treat these reports differently during change.
Not all reports and dashboards fail the same; some reports may lag, definitions might change, or data accuracy and relevance could wane. Understanding these variations aids in better risk anticipation.

Marketing uses several reports for its campaigns – standard analytic assets often delivered through marketing tools. Finance has very complex reports converted from Excel to BI tools while incorporating different consolidation rules. The marketing reports have a different failure mode than the financial reports. They, therefore, need to be managed differently.

It’s time for the company’s monthly business review. The marketing department proceeds to report on leads acquired per salesperson. Unfortunately, half the team has left the organization, and the data fails to load accurately. While this is an inconvenience for the marketing group, it isn’t detrimental to the business. However, a failure in financial reporting for a human resource consulting firm with 1000s contractors that contains critical and complex calculations about sickness, fees, hours, etc, has major implications and needs to be managed differently.

Acknowledging that assets transition through distinct phases allows for effective management decisions at each stage. As new visualizations are released, the information leads to broad use and adoption.
Think back to the start of the pandemic. COVID dashboards were quickly put together and released to the business, showing pertinent information: how the virus spreads, demographics affected the business and risks, etc. At the time, it was relevant and served its purpose. As we moved past the pandemic, COVID-specific information became obsolete, and reporting is integrated into regular HR reporting.
Reports and dashboards are crafted to deliver valuable insights for stakeholders. Over time, though, the worth of assets changes.
When a company opens its first store in a certain area, there are many elements it needs to understand – other stores in the area, traffic patterns, pricing of products, what products to sell, etc. Once the store is operational for some time, specifics are not as important, and it can adopt the standard reporting. The tailor-made analytic assets become irrelevant and no longer add value to the store manager.