Archiving the history versions of the reports in Cognos Portal

[vincognos]

Hi All,

We are using Cognos 8.3 in our company. We have the requirement of scheduling the reports on daily basis.I wanted to know if we can store all the different versions (daily) in the cognos connection.When i schedule daily,the latest version replaces the old version.I am not able to find all the report versions.We want to maintain all the history versions of the reports in the Cognos connection.Please let me know how to achieve this.

Should we use SDK for this

Please advise.

Thanks,Vinod

 

[toddl]

Have you gone into the properties of the report and changed the number of report output versions? Is that what you are looking for?


Todd

 

[vincognos]

Hi Todd,

Thanks for the reply.We actually have monthly,daily and weekly reports.So we want to maintain all the different versions of the report in a portal which can be cognos or anyother web portal .And the names can be like reportname_date which will make it unique.

I also tried the saving output file outside cognos option(another file system) which saves in the path we provide.
I have given some server name as the path and I am trying to save the scheduled reports in that folder.The scheduler says that access is denied.

Please advise ,which is better option for our requirement.Can we do with the save option another file system as mentioned above or any batch processing or do we neeed to use SDK.

Thanks,Vinod

 

[toddl]

Sorry Vinod,

Thats an area I haven't been able to solve myself. I currently manually save the reports into a folder of the month. If we had more scheduled reports, I probably would use SDK to handle it.

Todd

 

[ict2000]

Hi Vinod,

If saving report outputs in a file system (instead of in Content Store) is an option you are looking for, then it is possible to save all scheduled reports in the naming convention you mention (reportname_date).

First you need to set the option "Save report outputs..." to True in Cognos Configuration, then you need to set the folder path and script name in Cognos Connection | Server Administration... using CM.OUTPUTLOCATION and CM.OUTPUTSCRIPT. Check this out in Cognos KB.

Then you need to write a script (Microsoft VBScript for example if you use Windows server) to use the information in the file descriptor to change the report output into the naming convention you want. Note that 2 files will be produced for you: 1 is the report output (pdf, xls, ...) and the other xml file is the file descriptor. Check this out in Cognos Server Admin doco.

A lot can be done in the above script once you are comfortable with the script, for example, emailing, renaming, moving files...

 

[vincognos]

ict2000,

Thanks a lot for the reply.It was really helpful.

I have few issues.The file is getting saved when I save it to the output folder.But when I see the status in the past activities it shows as status "failed".
And When I try to save the report in pdf format it saves ,but if i try to save in excel format in the output file system it is not saving.Do I need to install any office patches.
Please advise.

Thanks,Vinod

 

[ict2000]

The Excel output file is saved with MHT extension, instead of XLS. Thus you need to add a section in the script to rename the extension to XLS. The sample section below is written in VBScript where strFileExt will be later used to rename the output file.

If UCase(strFileExt) = "MHT" Then
strFileExt = "xls"
End If

For the other issue where status showed "failed", you need to check the scheduled task to find out why. It could be a scheduling issue and completely unrelated with the original issue of archiving all versions of scheduled reports.