When it comes to user experience, the graphical user interface plays a major role in bringing about a good user experience. Since the very start of Cognos BI, the Cognos BI application developers focused on attaining a much better user experience by providing some excellent and advanced features. These features not only help in quick content management, but also provide a very user-friendly environment. In this chapter we will introduce the additional features that Cognos has along with the customization of the Cognos environment. The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
Cognos provides a professional web interface where all the studios are web-based. This includes Query Studio, Report Studio, Event Studio, Analysis Studio, Cognos Workspace, Cognos Workspace Advanced, and much more. Of course, there is Cognos Connection as well as Cognos Administration Portal. The Cognos BI environment provides flexibility and adaptability to change almost all the appearance sections of the studios and connections, as per the requirements of different organizations. For example, a company would always want the company logo next to each professional business report. A company has a color scheme, font styles, sizes, images, and a logo that apply to the company's official website, internal portals, and even the company letter heads and employee visiting cards.
IBM Cognos BI provides some built-in styles (CSS, skins). Once applied globally by an administrator, it changes the global look and feel of almost all the sections (studios, connections, Admin Portal). The IBM Cognos BI administrator may change the default style by altering the Styles section of the default user preferences from the Cognos namespace residing in the Security tab. Cognos BI also provides the flexibility to add custom styles (containing custom colors, fonts, images, and so on). The following screenshot shows some of the different predefined styles available:
Styles may also be changed from the style management utility, which is located on each Cognos BI Gateway. A custom style may be created by duplicating the existing style and editing it. When a user logs in for the first time, a default style is tagged for this user and is hardcoded, unless the user manually changes it. If you disable all styles except the preferred style, the user cannot change the style as there is only one style available. Therefore, the administrator must apply the company style prior to allowing access to users. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to change the style company wide. When no other style is available, Cognos BI uses the Corporate style. The following screenshot shows the Cognos namespace's default Cognos user preferences section with the company style selected as default for all new users:
A detailed procedure for customizing the Cognos styles is available on the Cognos website, where every section is discussed separately.
The following link points to the IBM Cognos BI 10.2 documentation homepage:
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/cbi/v10r2m0/index.jsp
Try searching for Customizing the Appearance of Cognos.
The following steps briefly explain how a custom Cognos style can be created:
c10_location/webcontent/skins/style
. The CSS file usually contains the details of fonts, colors, and so on. Also, a lot of the changes are made using XML.Cognos BI also provides a command-line-based utility to manage styles. The gateway servers contain this utility that is located at the Cognos installation path. Once the styles are created, they can be used as the basis for creating other custom styles. Once the custom styles are created using this utility, XML files may be used to make global customizations to the appearance of the Cognos Connection and Administration portals. XML validation is also performed by this utility. Once these files are created, they are saved to Content Manager. Once published, these styles are visible to users. The following steps show you how to create and deploy a custom style using this utility for Cognos Administration:
style.xml
file located at c10_location/temp
.c10_location/temp
for the new style. This folder contains the files necessary for the new style, including CSS and images. For the IBM Cognos Connection and Administration portals, the style changes are updated dynamically by the utility. Fonts and layout properties can be changed by manually changing the .css
files..css
, images, and .xml
files to your desired style name folder and move this folder to c10_locationwebcontentskins
on all the gateway locations.