Printing and Saving Business Insight Dashboards

A core feature of Cognos has always been the ability to save and print the result of a Report, Query, Analysis or other Cognos BI component. For most of these components the option is either in the run options or in the report viewer with the “view in” drop-down .

Where a print/save option is not available directly (such as Active Reports), there is always the option of using the print capabilities of the browser, Excel or other tool that a BI component can be exported to.

Printing from Business Insight

Out of the box, Business Insight does not provide the option of printing or saving to PDF or other formats. It is possible to save or print any individual “widget”…

Printing from the Browser

Cognos Connection, by default, launches Business Insight in a browser in a mode where toolbars and browser menus (such as file->print) are disabled.

There are two ways to print.

• Use Ctrl+P browser keyboard shortcut. The simplest is that while Cognos has launched the browser such that you can’t invoke the menus, the keyboard shortcuts are still available.
• Create a special browser bookmark with a modified URL to launch in a full browser window (read on for details)

Cognos Connection invokes report viewing and launching tools like Business Insight using URLs. How Business Insight is launched can be controlled by parameters within the URL. With QueryVision’s SharePoint Web Parts for Cognos, we provide manipulate those options to launch Business Insight in a separate browser window with the full browser display. From there a user can print or use print drivers such as Microsoft’s XPS Document Writer or PDF writers such as CutePDF writer to save the output to the file system.

For Cognos Connection users, this can be achieved by the following in Internet Explorer:

• In Cognos Connection, navigate to the folder with the Business Insight Dashboard.
• For the Dashboard, select Actions->more…->Add to bookmarks…
• In your browser, find the bookmark and open the properties.
• Select and copy the URL field to and editor.

The following is an example of the URL:

http://w23stdcg103:80/ibmcognos/cgi-bin/cognos.cgi?b_action=xts.run&m=portal/main.xts&m_redirect_windowmode=2&m_redirect=%2fibmcognos%2fcgi-bin%2fcognos.cgi%3fb_action%3dxts.run%26m%3dportal%2flaunch.xts%26ui.gateway%3d%252fibmcognos%252fcgi-bin%252fcognos.cgi%26ui.tool%3dDashboardConsole%26ui.action%3dedit%26ui.atompath%3dPublic%252520Folders%252fSamples%252fModels%252fBusiness%252520Insight%252520Samples%252fEmployee%252520Satisfaction%252520Dashboard

Change the entry highlighted in yellow (&m_redirect_windowmode=2) and change the value to =0 (zero) and paste back to the Bookmark URL.

This bookmark will now launch the Business Insight Dashboard in the full browser where you can print or save.

Note: For FireFox and other browsers, the Add to Bookmarks option in Cognos Connection may not be available. Two alternatives:

• Create the bookmark using IE and then transfer the bookmark to the browser of your choice.
• Open the “set properties” action for the Dashboard in Cognos Connection and select “View the search path, ID and URL” in the top right corner, then copy the “Default action URL” and make the same change as listed above and save in a bookmark.

Note: these techniques work in Google Chrome, IE and Firefox