Bursting Cognos Reports is one of the best functions within IBM Cognos Report Studio. If you are not familiar with bursting let me explain how it works. You have a report that is for your sales team. Each salesperson is responsible for a certain region and you want each person to only see their region’s sales. Normally, you would make a report for each sales person because we know how territorial sales people are about their commission. Report writers love bursting because they can use one report to serve multiple people with what looks be a custom report.

Here is how it works best. The salesperson name and email address should exist in a burst table within Framework Manager. Granted, you can make a burst query within Report Studio, but that would mean the burst query is unique to that report. Each time you make a report for sales people and you want to use bursting, you would have to make another query inside the next report. By putting the bursting items in Framework Manager, you can simply select the items and they are available to you whenever you use the Framework Manager Package. See what I am saying about how it will work best? I am aware there are many ways to do something, but I try to give you my best advice first!

Anyway, back to the bust function. You select the salesperson name and email address from the burst table and put them into a query. You then create your report using another query, which can be a list or a crosstab. After you have made your crosstab or list report, drag another list on to the page and set the query property to the bust query. Then drag the report crosstab into the list. This means the crosstab should be imbedded into the list, because we all know that you can’t burst a crosstab report so you need to make it a list report.

When you set the burst options within the report, make sure you are using the burst query. The crosstab and the burst query must have a relationship. This means that the salesperson name must somehow exist in the crosstab because you will need to join the two together so that the crosstab will be filtered properly.

After you have setup the report to burst, make sure you go into the properties of the report and check the burst option. This process will work also work if you want to burst multiple list on the same report.  For more information on bursting check out this link .

Did you like this blog on Bursting Cognos Reports, if so check out this blog on Using Cognos Lifecycle Manager to Validate Your Migration by clicking here.