On common problem in the daily business e.g. during the migration from Business Objects to Cognos is the export of multiple csv files from one single report. In full clients this is easily possible, heavily used and well accepted (for example by Business Objects Users)
In Web applications which are based on a HTTP GET Request it is unfortunately impossible to accomplish such a feature since it is only possible to support one single file transfer through one single HTTP request. Therefore IBM Cognos 8 does by design return only the CSV File for the first query (alphabetic order). All other Queries will be ignored.
So, what is the recommend way to solve the users problem?
One possible way to do this would be to create a forward page which is able to decide based on the requested output format if the user should be forwarded to the normal report layout or a CSV helper page. The helper page itself will ask for the meaningful name or description of the query which should be exported.
After answering the query question the user will be forwarded to a simple csv report and is able to save the output. For using this functionality the requesting IBM Cognos Consumer has to have the right to execute reports with embedded HTML containers, otherwise the user will get an error message saying that his user rights are to low to execute such kind of report.
Overall this solution is an acceptable workaround for reports which can´t be fully exported to CSV in IBM Cognos yet. Nevertheless if the output is needed for an daily progress it could be an option to save the csv output with an IBM Cognos SDK program on a central fileshare in the network rather than exporting the data manually. For sure also the use of the xml output format instead would be an good workaround.
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