While researching some upcoming Cognos/SharePoint and general Cognos products and features, we needed to get an in-depth understanding of the Cognos implementation of bursting and what options there are for saving individual and burst report outputs to the file system as part of the run report options vs. selecting to save a Report to the users local computer from the Report Viewer.
The features are somewhat different for each version of Cognos. Cognos 10.1 FP1 is described here.
Other blogs in this series:
Individual Report Output Files and Burst Report Outputs can be saved to the file system with two independent techniques.
- Save Individual Report Outputs – on demand saving of report output when run with options or when scheduled. Cognos refers to this as “Save a Copy of Report Output Outside of IBM Cognos Software”
- Save All Report Output – all report outputs are saved to the Content Manager and the file system. Cognos refers to this as “Save a Copy of Report Output in IBM Cognos Software”
Saving Individual Reports/On Demand requires setting up a root file folder in Cognos Configuration and setting sub-folders of the root for users to select in Cognos Connection Administration. When users run or schedule a report (including a burst report), if they select to save one or more report outputs, the option to save to the file system will be available in the advanced options, where the name, sub-folder and duplicate name conflict resolution options can be selected.
Saving All Report Outputs is advertised by Cognos as focused on archiving and requires setting up a “Save report outputs to a file system” property in Cognos Configuration, plus setting up the properties CM.OUTPUTLOCATION (for the root folder) and optional CM.OUTPUTSCRIPT and CM.OUTPUTBYBURSTKEY for Content Manager in Cognos Connection Administration. The feature does save all Report Outputs to the file system, all in the root folder defined by CM.OUTPUTLOCATION. If Save Individual and Save All features are enabled, report output is saved to Conent Manager, and to the Save All root folder and (if selected by the user) to the Save Individual location.
For both techniques, the ability of the Cognos BI Server to write to a folder is dependent on the account which is used to run the Cognos Services. For Windows, the default is to run under the Local System account, which provides access to folders on the Cognos Server, but no network access. To access other servers requires running as a Network Account, or as a domain account, which may be required for other reasons. Our recommendation? On Windows, use a Domain Account.
One key point we’d like to make about both of the available techniques – they appear to have been defined assuming a single “tenant” for a Cognos installation and that they have a free hand to ask Cognos Administrators to change and configure the options to their requirements. For internal Cloud/SaaS type installations with multiple “tenants” (which are becoming increasingly common), “Save to the File System” may be a feature that the Cognos Cloud Service Administrators may not want to enable. Certainly the current implementation doesn’t give the level of control desirable for a multi-tenant installation.
Interaction, similarities and differences
-
Settings Interaction
- Independent – Both can be active at the same time. Configuration properties for each option in Cognos Configuration and/or Cognos Connection Administration do not interact. Some posts on the web state that the “Save to file system” property in Cognos Configuration affects both options. It only affects the Save All Reports feature.
- Different Root Folders – Each of the techniques can have a different root folder – either on the Cognos Server or to any share location in the same domain as the Cognos server. Each uses a different mechanism to set the root folder.
- External File/Folder Management Required – Neither performs file or folder management other than overwrite and unique naming options/techniques.
- Different Root Folder formats – Each of the techniques specifies the root folder in slightly different formats.
- Error notifications differ – If an attempt to save to the file system with the Save Individual feature fails, an error will appear for the report execution results (e.g. access denied). No errors will be generated in most cases if the Save All feature fails.
- File Naming differs – Each uses a different file naming convention.
- Companion description file – Files output with either technique include a companion description file <name>_desc.xml which uses the same structure, but slightly different content.
- When changes become active – In both cases a change to Cognos Configuration requires a Cognos application restart, changes in Cognos Connection Administration do not.
- Cognos version differences – The specific location for setting up the CM.OUTPUTLOCATION properties in CC Administration is different for the various versions of Cognos 8.X and 10.X. The Administration interface will quite a happily let you set the properties in the incorrect location without error. Read the Admin and Security manual carefully as to the steps.
- Unix/Linux considerations – Saving to Linux/Unix requires support of the Windows UNC naming convention.
-
File/Folder permissions – the machine or domain account that Cognos servers will impact where you can define a root folder.