Report Studio Best Practice / Best Way Question

[UcfMike]

I'm building a prompt page for a report, and I'm going to be stuck using Static Choices for my prompt selection. This is the requirement from my boss. The values for the prompts will be used in other reports. I would like to come up with a way to store the static choices in one place and then simply reference that, say a text file. How can I do this?

Modifing Framework Manger isn't an option.

Does a Layout Component work best for this?

 

[blom0344]

I do not see how a text file could be used, but nothing is stopping you from writing a SQL that generates the static choices. It would look a bit awkward, but nothing would prevent you from listing static values in the select clause.

I guess you will need to use Cognos SQL and Cognos is possibly expecting a common table expression (the 'with' construction --> temporary table)

Does this make sense?

Ties Blom

 

[UcfMike]

It does, but my Boss is adamant about not wanting to hit the database to get the choices.

What I think we may do is build a report, with the prompts in the report, name them, and then reference them in other reports.

 

[blom0344]

What do you mean with 'hitting' the database?
The query syntax itself can store the values which means you can read from a dummy and have only a read action on the temp table from the with clause.
Pardon, me saying, but if this is considered a potential problem, then you may need another boss.

Stick to tried technology, don't try to invent this from scratch..

Ties Blom

 

[almeids]

I agree with Ties that Adam Ant is being unreasonable. While using your db's dummy table to generate static choices would technically involve "hitting" the db I can't see the issue there - aren't you hitting it for the report data anyway?

Making this available/reusable in other reports suggests putting it in FM; eliminating that as an option also sounds like some inefficient political workaround for what should be a straightforward technical solution.

Cognos also has a "Proven Practice" document "Saving Picklist Values to a Local File for Reuse" for ReportNet which might be of some help (perhaps if the "local file" is on a mapped network drive?).