Layout Component References - for everything!

LCRs and Report Styles are one of the best features of reporting in an enterprise environment. They allow for object reuse across hundreds of reports. Ensuring consistency in look and feel and a massive reduction in report maintenance costs.

For example, we can define a prompt in a master report and reuse that prompt in all reports using an LCR.

Where LCRs fall short though is that some objects within a report require things that are not part of the layout. For example, if we define an LCR for a prompt, we have to ensure the query is copy/pasted into every report that uses that prompt. This means that whilst the prompt can be maintained in a single location, we have hundreds of the same prompt query. Which is a maintenance head ache.

As well as having the ability to use a layout object for a LCR, Cognos should have the ability to have queries, variables, conditional styles etc as LCRs (no longer just layout).

This would allow an author to bring a prompt into their report as an LCR, and also everything used by that prompt - such as the query - would also be an LCR.

Theres a couple of ways this could work...
Most simple would be to add things like a Query Component Reference , or a Conditional Style Component Reference.

A more sophisticated solution would be making objects more modular. For example, if the user brings in a prompt as an LCR, then within the LCR Overrides would also be the underlying query. If the author does nothing, then the prompt will automatically use the query within the LCR source report.

Within the report using the prompt as an LCR the prompt query wouldnt even exist, as the prompt would know to use the query from the LCR source report.

The author could use an override to point the prompt to an alternate query, this could either be a query in the report the author is working on, or a completely different report.

The same idea could be extended to anything used by an object for example if a list uses a conditional style, by default it would use the conditional style from the LCR source, but the author could override to point to a different conditional style.

This makes report authoring very modular, an author can just bring in a prompt, a list, a chart etc from other reports, and not worry about the queries that are needed to go with them. This would a great piece of functionality for business authors who could easily assemble reports from an object library.