Macro’s in Cognos Report Studio

The Cognos engine understands the presence of a macro as it is written within a pair of hashes (#). It executes the macros first and puts the result back into report specification like a literal string replacement. We can use this to alter data items, filters, and slicers at run time.

Here are some examples of macro functions:

1.       Prompt: [Country Name] = #prompt('Country')#.

·         Create a simple report which is having Country Name,Area Name,Project Desc and Francise columns.

·         Go to Query Explorer and open the query used by list.

·         Add a detail filter with following definition:

[Country Name] = #prompt('Country')#.

·         After running the report we can see a mandatory prompt for Country Name.

·         The report will output will be as follows

2.       PromptMany:[Area Name]  in (#promptmany('AreaName')#)

·         Create a simple report which is having Country Name,Area Name,Project Desc and Francise columns.

                  ·         Go to Query Explorer and open the query used by list.

·         Add a detail filter with following definition:

[Area Name]  in (#promptmany('AreaName')#)

                  ·         After running the report it will allow you to enter multiple values