An Active Report is a means of delivering interactivity in a report without having to maintain a connection to your cognos server. This is achieved by including report data in the report output. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to this. The advantages are that you can use the report remotely, and not have to rely on maintaining a network connection. The disadvantages are that there is a finite amount of data you would want to add in to the report - or else you risk it becoming an unmanageable monster.
Active Reports are best suited to high-level summarised data, and probably no more than (say) 10Mb in total. Otherwise you might have issues with email attachment limitations, mailbox sizes and network transfer speeds.
All of the existing report distribution channels, including scheduling and bursting, can be employed to circulate Active reports across large user communities.
In order to allow for consumption outside of Cognos Viewer, the reports are rendered in a MHTML (sometimes referred to MHT) format consumable by all standard browsers (Firefox will require an extension to be installed). In order to allow for offline interactivity by the end user, all the data that may be viewed by the end user through report prompts must be stored in the output file.
Active reports open in a standard browser window there by eliminating the need for Cognos Connection, third party or programmatic access to Cognos viewer. In addition, the entire data set needed to support the report is published in the self contained MHT file. This eliminates the need to interact with larger and potentially slower data sources and provides rapid performance for small and medium sized reports (more on this later).
Are there any Red Flags with IBM Cognos 10 Active Reports?
The first point of consideration should be that of security
Amount of data necessary to support the report grows, there will be a corresponding increase in the file size and a decrease in the responsiveness of the report.
Due to the fact that there is no charting engine available once the report has been saved as an MHT file, it is necessary for the report to hold a pre-rendered view of each chart view a user may request. This can of course lead to very large report files again impacting performance.
Active Reports are best suited to high-level summarised data, and probably no more than (say) 10Mb in total. Otherwise you might have issues with email attachment limitations, mailbox sizes and network transfer speeds.
All of the existing report distribution channels, including scheduling and bursting, can be employed to circulate Active reports across large user communities.
In order to allow for consumption outside of Cognos Viewer, the reports are rendered in a MHTML (sometimes referred to MHT) format consumable by all standard browsers (Firefox will require an extension to be installed). In order to allow for offline interactivity by the end user, all the data that may be viewed by the end user through report prompts must be stored in the output file.
Active reports open in a standard browser window there by eliminating the need for Cognos Connection, third party or programmatic access to Cognos viewer. In addition, the entire data set needed to support the report is published in the self contained MHT file. This eliminates the need to interact with larger and potentially slower data sources and provides rapid performance for small and medium sized reports (more on this later).
Are there any Red Flags with IBM Cognos 10 Active Reports?
The first point of consideration should be that of security
Amount of data necessary to support the report grows, there will be a corresponding increase in the file size and a decrease in the responsiveness of the report.
Due to the fact that there is no charting engine available once the report has been saved as an MHT file, it is necessary for the report to hold a pre-rendered view of each chart view a user may request. This can of course lead to very large report files again impacting performance.
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