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This video will demonstrate NetVisn’s Real Time Versioning of Cognos report specifications including change details,
version restoration, and management of development projects
Real Time Versioning is made possible with the NetVisn Audit Monitor feature which is able
to determine when objects in the content store are modified.
When a report changes, NetVisn checks to see if there has been a change to the specification,
in which case the previous one will be versioned.
Versioning works for all Cognos studios including, report, query, analysis and PowerPlay studios.
With the NetVisn Version Manager, specification versions can be compared in various formats, tested in a report viewer, and also restored.
A complete history of specification changes are maintained which can be used to monitor all report development activity.
Let’s start by making some changes to a report in Report Studio.
Here we have the report Customer Orders opened in Report Studio.
It’s a simple report but will be able to demonstrate a few types of changes to the specification.
First a grouping needs to be added on the Order ID column, and the Group Span needs to be set on the other columns at the Order level.
I’ll click the Save button to keep those changes. In normal development the author would
usually run the report to test the change and then do a save.
Next a couple of Order Detail columns will be added to the report and those changes will be saved.
The column Product ID will be deleted and that change saved.
Lastly a change to the layout of the report will be made by changing the report title.
Now let’s go to the NetVisn application which I have running in another browser instance.
From the NetVisn home page I will go to the Audit Console tab.
The Audit Console is a way to view data which has been collected by the NetVisn Audit Monitor
which tracks changes to the Cognos content store.
The filter will be set to return activity for Today, and Detail information will be added to the output.
Clicking Run will generate the results.
Here we can see all the activity for today. The Audit Monitor tracks all changes in the content store including who made the change
and the details of what changed.
For example there was a change to a report object’s properties earlier today.
What we are interested in now though are changes to reports specs.
Here we can see all the changes to the Customer Order report made from Report Studio,
including the account making the changes.
I will click on the object link to view the report’s documentation in NetVisn.
Here is the report documented in NetVisn.
The Sections panel on the left contains links to different parts of the documentation.
In the General Info section we can see the Specification Time showing the time of the last save from Report Studio.
This field is managed in NetVisn.
The Object Change History section contains information about changes to this object picked up by the NetVisn Audit Monitor.
Here we can see the new versions created from the saves in Report Studio.
Next we’ll look at the Specification Versions section.
This section has information about the report specifications which have been archived.
Each time a report is saved from the studio, the current spec is archived but in order to limit the number of versions,
only the last two saves made by a user in the same Cognos session are retained.
The number of versions saved per session is configurable.
Clicking on the Version Manager link will open this feature.
The Version Manager has a number of different features.
The current version of the report and all the archived versions are displayed with the Spec Date,
Studio Version, Model Date, Author and Session.
We will compare the current version, to the report version before the recent changes.
There are different ways to view these changes. The first will look at is Query Info.
This view displays changes to the data section of the report displayed in easy to read HTML.
Deletions are in Red with a strikethrough, and Adds are in Green.
In order to see all of the changes in the specification, we need to compare the versions in XML.
The first view is side by side. Clicking the Next Button is one way to see all the differences in the XML.
The other XML view is Merged which again uses green to represent added, and red for deleted elements or attributes.
Any type of change will be documented here whether in the data or layout sections of the specification.
Here is the change that was made to the report title.
Before restoring a version you may want to view the output. Clicking the preview will run the specification in a custom report viewer.
Click the Restore button to update the report in the content store which the archived specification.
Some audit comments can be added.
Once the restore has completed the archive versions have changed, so we will exit back to the report documentation.
Here we can see that the specification time has been updated, and in the Specification Version section a new version has been added.
To wrap this up, let’s take one more look at the Audit Console.
As a manager you may want to keep track of all the report modifications taking place.
By setting the filters in the Audit Console to only include Specification Changes, and grouping the output by Account,
you can see the list of authors and the reports they have been working on.
This information can also be used to discover if users with Studio capability are actually using the studios.
In summary, with the Real Time Versioning capability in NetVisn, all changes to reports are automatically captured.
Only the most recent versions are saved based upon a user’s session in Cognos.
Versions can be compared in multiple formats and previewed before restoring the specification to the content store.
With the NetVisn Audit Console all author activity can be easily monitored
and this is all done without requiring any modification to your Cognos software.