integrating ibm mashup center and ibm cognos 8public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/dm/cognos/...existing...

Tip or Technique

Integrating IBM Mashup Center and IBM Cognos 8

Product(s): IBM Cognos 8

Area of Interest: Infrastructure

Integrating IBM Mashup Center and IBM Cognos 8 2

Copyright and Trademarks

Licensed Materials - Property of IBM. © Copyright IBM Corp. 2009 IBM, the IBM logo, and Cognos are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

While every attempt has been made to ensure that the information in this document is accurate and complete, some typographical errors or technical inaccuracies may exist. IBM does not accept responsibility for any kind of loss resulting from the use of information contained in this document. The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice.

This document is maintained by the Best Practices, Product and Technology team. You can send comments, suggestions, and additions to [email protected].


Contents

1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 4

1.1 PURPOSE ................................................................................................................ 4

1.2 APPLICABILITY ......................................................................................................... 4

2 IBM MASHUP CENTER AND IBM COGNOS 8 BI ............................................. 4

2.1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 4

2.2 IBM MASHUP CENTER ............................................................................................... 4

2.3 IBM COGNOS 8 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ....................................................................... 5

3 WORKFLOW .................................................................................................. 5

3.1 SCENARIO ............................................................................................................... 5

3.2 OVERVIEW .............................................................................................................. 6

4 CREATING A RSS FEED TO RETRIEVE REAL TIME DATA ............................... 6

5 DESIGN THE MASHUP PAGE ....................................................................... 10

5.1 ADD THE DATA FEED WIDGET .................................................................................... 10

5.2 ADD THE URL CUSTOMIZER AND WEBSITE DISPLAYER WIDGETS ......................................... 11

6 PROMPTING AND PARAMETERIZED URLS .................................................. 12

6.1 REPORT PROMPTS ................................................................................................... 12

6.2 PARAMETERIZED URL INTERFACE ................................................................................ 12

6.3 CONFIGURE URL CUSTOMIZER WIDGET ........................................................................ 13

7 WIRING THE WIDGETS ............................................................................... 14

7.1 WIRING THE STOCK WATCH LIST RSS WIDGET TO URL CUSTOMIZER WIDGET ....................... 14

7.2 WIRING THE URL CUSTOMIZER WIDGET TO THE WEBSITE DISPLAYER WIDGET ....................... 15

8 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................. 16


1 Introduction

1.1 Purpose

This article describes an end-to-end process to integrate dynamic market metrics with rich Business Intelligence content. This is achieved by using IBM Mashup Center to easily assemble real time feeds into functional mash ups and IBM Cognos to integrate external data into on-demand reports through its parameterized URL interface.

1.2 Applicability

The technique and behaviour outlined in this document have been tested on IBM Cognos 8.4.

2 IBM Mashup Center and IBM Cognos 8 BI

2.1 Introduction

Introducing Web 2.0 to business intelligence software brings in an exciting new dimension to how enterprise data can be leveraged.

IBM Mashup Center's Lotus Mashups is a lightweight mashup environment that can consume web and enterprise data through widgets and information feeds to produce new applications in order to address daily business challenges. Integrating IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence with IBM Lotus Mashups combines the power of business intelligence with the power of mashups to draw upon content from variety of external data sources. This enables you to take real time business decisions and integrate real time market metrics in order to optimize operations and maximize profits.

2.2 IBM Mashup Center

IBM Mashup Center is made of two components InfoSphere Mashup Hub and Lotus Mashups. Using these together feeds can be created from a variety of data sources and published into a mash-up of widgets.

IBM InfoSphere Mashup Hub is an information management platform to unravel and publish web, enterprise and departmental information. The product provides a graphical environment to create, store, transform and publish feeds into a central repository. It can also create feed mashups and upload custom built widgets. IBM Lotus Widget Factory is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) which can be used to create your own widgets.

IBM Lotus Mashups is a lightweight mashup environment that acts as an assembly layer for enterprise and personal content to create dynamic web applications. Together, IBM Mashup Center provides an environment in which you can build dynamic web applications to represent enterprise content. In addition to creating custom widgets a set of highly useful sample widgets are also provided to power your web applications.

More information on this topic can be found on IBM Mashup Center wiki.


2.3 IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

IBM Cognos 8 is the leading business intelligence and performance management platform which provides reporting, analysis, score carding and event management of enterprise- scale data. IBM Cognos BI has excellent reporting capabilities which can effectively represent large amounts of information using rich charts, graphs, report templates, drill functions and conditional formatting. The architecture is based on the SOA Philosophy which makes it platform independent, extensible and scalable. Apart from its own portal and a robust SDK IBM Cognos 8 also provides an URL interface to automate tasks. Many functions such as invoking reports and launching IBM Cognos 8 studios can be accessed through this interface.

3 Workflow

3.1 Scenario

Let us consider a scenario in order to understand how IBM Mashup Center and IBM Cognos 8 BI can generate on-demand reports combing real time data feeds.IBM Mashup Center allows you to create feeds from operational databases, spreadsheets, existing web feeds and enterprise data sources like IBM Information Server and Domino Server.

Consider a RSS feed which provides the live stock prices of the top five retail companies registered in the stock market, based either on market capitalization, top daily gains, or large trade volumes. Financial performance reports to show the revenue, profit and sales trends of the retail company over the fiscal year are designed in IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence server, connected to a database which stores historical financial data of the companies. We provide a technique to link the stock market metrics data to these Cognos reports. The reports are authored in such a way that they take a market metric like current stock price or stock name as input and deliver the detailed financial BI report of that company as output.

As a result the business analyst can take real time decisions about the stock portfolio being managed, by analysing integration of business intelligence reports with dynamic market metrics on a single on demand dashboard. The flow of the information in our system will be as follows:

Figure 1: Scenario Architecture Flow

1. RSS feed will provide list and details top retail stocks to IBM Mashup Center. 2. On selecting one of the stock names in Stock list widget, the Symbol name of

that company is sent to the URL Customizer widget.


3. The URL is constructed from the parameter received, and the parameterized URL is sent to the Website displayer widget.

4. IBM Cognos generates an on-demand report based on the URL and the report is presented in the Website Displayer widget.

3.2 Overview

Before we start, let us have a look at the general workflow this document provides:

1. Create and publish a feed in IBM InfoSphere Mashup Hub from an existing RSS feed to retrieve real time data.

2. Design the web page in the Lotus Mashups environment using widgets.

3. Wire the widgets to IBM Cognos reports.

4 Creating a RSS feed to retrieve real time data

In InfoSphere Mashup Hub we will create a mash-up feed using an existing RSS feed. In this example the RSS feed is located at http://remoteserver/Top5RetailStocksfeed.xml

1) Create the Mashup feed in the InfoSphere Mashup Hub client.

Figure 2. IBM InfoSphere MashupHub


2) Create a new feed by selecting “Existing RSS or Atom Feed (Registration)” as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Select the feed data source

Figure 4: Specify the RSS feed URL


Figure 5: Enter details for the feed


3) Add the feed to Lotus Mashups to make it available to the mashup widgets to design the page.

Figure 6: Add to Lotus Mashups

Now the feed should be available in Lotus Mashups to be used by the widgets.


5 Design the Mashup page

Open the Lotus Mashups environment to design the web page that will display the mashed up content of feeds and Cognos reports. The feed we published in the earlier step is presented as a data viewer widget in Lotus Mashups.

5.1 Add the Data feed widget

Figure 7: Add the Top5RetailStocksfeed widget

Figure 8: The Stock Watch List widget

The added widget displays the top five valued retail stocks from the stock market the feed is attached to.


5.2 Add the URL Customizer and Website Displayer widgets

An URL Customizer is a built-in widget to create dynamic URLs where the URL parameters can be provided from other widgets or events. We will use this widget to construct the URL to invoke the Cognos report with real time parameters.

Website Displayer widget displays the website based on a URL provided. In this scenario, the URL Customizer widget will provide the URL to the Website Displayer to display the Cognos report. As shown in Figure 9, add the widgets to the Mashup page.

Figure 9: URL Customizer and Website Displayer widgets


6 Prompting and Parameterized URLs

6.1 Report prompts

Parameters can be passed to Cognos reports by defining prompts and filters on the report. For more information on how to create parameters and prompts refer to the IBM Cognos Report Studio User Guide.

In our example we insert a filter on the name of the retailer. It can also be designed to take the stock price and generate a report that depends on the current price of the stock.

Figure 10: Example of Filter in a IBM Cognos report

6.2 Parameterized URL interface

The IBM Cognos URL interface provides an effective way to perform different Cognos tasks and allows you to integrate IBM Cognos into external applications. This URL interface can be used to launch Cognos viewer, Query studio, Report studio or Analysis studio and run reports. For a complete reference see the Performing Tasks using Parameterized URLs document on the Proven Practice website.


6.3 Configure URL Customizer widget

In our example we invoke the report 'Profit and Revenue Report' in the 'GO Data Warehouse (query)' package. The URL to run this report should look similar to this:

http://<server_name>/c84c/cgi-

bin/cognos.cgi?b_action=cognosViewer&ui.object=/content/package

[@name='GO Data Warehouse (query)']/report[@name='Profit and

Revenue

Report']&ui.action=run&run.prompt=false&p_Stock_Prompt=Extreme

This URL can now be added to the URL Customizer widget as shown below:

Figure 11: Configure URL Customizer widget


7 Wiring the widgets

Wire the RSS Feed widget, URL Customizer and Website displayer using the wiring interface.

Figure 12: Wiring Graph

7.1 Wiring the Stock Watch List RSS widget to URL Customizer widget

Any data content displayed in the RSS feed widget can be selected to be sent to another widget like Symbol, Opening Price or Trade Volume. In our example we pass on the Symbol as we have configured the IBM Cognos report to prompt for Stock name: p_Stock_prompt.

Figure 13: Wiring the RSS widget to URL Customizer


7.2 Wiring the URL Customizer widget to the Website displayer widget

Figure 14: Wiring URL Customizer to Web Site Displayer Now the widgets are wired together to send and receive data. The default event to send data is a click on the row of the Stock Watch RSS Feed as demonstrated below.


Figure 15: On demand IBM Cognos reports The figure above illustrates the integration capabilities of IBM Cognos 8 BI with IBM Mashup Center.

8 Conclusion

This article demonstrates integration between IBM Mashup Center and IBM Cognos 8 BI to apply real time market data to business intelligence reports. This enables the business user to have better insight as to how a market change affected revenues in the past and thus is able to make an informed investment decision.

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