Using Prompt API for IBM Cognos BI Report Studio

Prompt API for IBM Cognos BI

Default values for report prompts? It doesn’t sound very difficult does it? Well as far as the default values are static you can define them easily with your report properties but in the real business world there’s no such thing as static. Change is just around the corner and so we need to have more dynamic reporting solutions. Making dynamic default values for report prompts is something that should be a out-of-the-box-feature (as it is in Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services for example) but with IBM Cognos BI Report Studio it has been about making some JavaScript/HTML/DOM hacks. Now they’ve released Prompt API for IBM Cognos BI to tackle down this issue. Well, it’s still Javascript but at least there is a documented API how to use it. Let’s give it a shot.

In my simple example I’ve created a report with two prompts and one HTML Item. The first “kkprompt”-prompt fetches the default value that is going to be selected in the another prompt. You can later on hide the first prompt box because it doesn’t need any user interaction. Now, to get the “defaultselprompt” prompt working with dynamic default value we need to add the following code inside the HTML Item.

And that’s pretty much it! I’m still amazed that this kind of feature is behind some javascript code and not available in the prompt box properties but hey, maybe in the next major release?

-GD