Technical References

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Cisco Prime Service Catalog 10.0 Reporting Guide
OL-31037-01
Chapter 1 Advanced Reporting Data Mart
Best Practices for Service Design and Reporting
Running Custom Reports and Queries
When report designers create custom reports or queries, they may save them either to the Public folders
(the Reports folder is the root public folder) or to their private folder (“My Folder”). Reports saved to
the private folders are runable/accessible only by the person who developed them.
Reports saved to the public folders are accessible/runable by any person who has a role that allows access
to the reports. These inherited permissions can be overridden Cognos Administration options, which
allow the Report Administrator to remove permissions to execute a report from the standard roles and
assign that permission to any person or custom role that has access to run reports.
In addition to being run from the Reporting module folders, reports are also accessible via hyperlinks.
Service designers may embed appropriate links in service descriptions, e-mail notifications or other
areas of the application. The format of the link is:
http://<CognosServer
Name>/crn/cgi-bin/cognos.cgi?CAMNamespace=TrustedSignOn&b_action=xts.run
&m=portal/report-viewer.xts&method=execute
&m_obj=/content//report[@name='<ReportName>']
Tips and Techniques for Developing Reports
These tips and techniques apply to the data and relationships in the Service Catalog data mart. As stated
above, for general instructions on using the IBM Cognos reporting tools, please consult appropriate IBM
Cognos documentation or third-party books on the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence solution.
Requisition and Task Dates and Times
Within the Service Catalog transactional database, all dates are stored in GMT/UTC format. However,
users are largely unaware of this fact, since the date is automatically converted to their preferred time
zone when it is shown in a module such as My Services or Service Manager.
The Service Catalog data mart, too, holds all dates in GMT/UTC. This may be a bit jarring at first, since
this is not the time zone in which most users are accustomed to seeing their data. Report designers have
two options:
• Set user expectations so they are not surprised to see dates in GMT/UTC.
• Use expressions available within Report Studio to convert the dates to a more familiar time zone.
(Only one time zone can be chosen, since Cognos is not aware of the individual user’s preferences.)
As an example of the second option, consider a customer whose corporate headquarters are in the Central
time zone of the United States. An expression to subtract 6 hours from the stored date/time displays the
date/time column in the expected time zone. The expression might look like:
[Query].[DUEDATETIME] - 000 06:00:00.000
Best Practices for Service Design and Reporting
The Ad-Hoc Reporting module allows the extraction to a data mart of requisition (form data) from
dictionaries and services which their designers have designated as “Reportable”. The service design
methodology for designing dictionaries and services must consider:
• Criteria for determining which services/dictionaries should be designated as reportable