MotioPI Pro provides a quick and easy way to mass update the Default Action for a set of Cognos reports.
First – let’s revisit the “Default Action” for a Cognos Report. This determines what Cognos does when a user clicks on a report in Cognos Connection. The field can be one of three values (shown below) :
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What if you needed to change this option to “Run the report” for hundreds of reports? It would be pretty tedious to do this one report at a time in Cognos Connection.
This is the type of operation where MotioPI Pro’s Property Distributor comes in handy.
Property Distributor lets you pick a single Cognos object as a “template”, and then allows you to replicate selected properties from this template object onto many other Cognos objects.
With that in mind, let’s walk through a quick example.
First, in Cognos Connection, let’s configure a template object to have a default action of “Run the report.” To do this, pick a report (any report will do, in the example below, we’re using “Banded Report”), click on its properties icon, and select the Report tab.
Switch the Default Action drop down to “Run the Report”, then Click OK
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Now, inside MotioPI Pro, go to the Property Distributor panel click on the Select Template Object button.
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You will now see the Cognos Object Selector window. Use the navigation tree to select the report you configured earlier. Then click the Select button
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Under the Template Properties, expand the Report section and select the “Default Portal Action = Run” property.
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Use the selector arrow to move this property to the Select Properties side.
Now we need to tell PI which reports we want to update.In the Select Target Object(s) section, use the Narrow button to select the reports you wish to update.
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When you click the Narrow button, the “Cognos Object Selector” window will appear. Select the object paths under the Cognos Content section and move them to the “Selected Items” section, then click Apply. In this situation, you are slecting the entire contents of the Report Studio Report Samples Folder.
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Now, click Submit.
NOTE: this will simply query for all the reports which are going to be updated (no updates will be applied yet).
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The query will begin to return results in the bottom section. When the query has completed you will see a full list of the reports found.
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Now, to select all the Reports in the list to update, click the select all check box.
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To preview the changes that will be made, click the Preview button at the bottom of the panel. You will now see the Property Distributor Preview windnow. If you select one of the reports you will see the Old Properties (on the left) and New Properties (on the right).
Any pending changes will be shown in blue.
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You can now click Run to apply the property update to each of the selected reports.
Once all the changes have been made, you will get a message box confirming the completion and informing you that backups were made.
Click OK, and now you can go back into Cognos Connection and confim that the changes were made by looking at the properties of various reports.
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