IBM Data Platform Ideas Portal for Customers


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against products and services offered by the IBM Data Platform organization. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


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We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:


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Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,


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Post ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted and upvote them if they matter to you,

  1. Post an idea

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  3. Get feedback from the IBM team to refine your idea


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

IBM Employees should enter Ideas at https://ideas.ibm.com



Add a new idea Subscribe
Status Submitted
Workspace Cognos Analytics
Components Dashboard
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 4, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Enable Inline Expand/Collapse [+]/[-] for Rows AND Columns in Dashboard Crosstabs (Relational Sources)

Current Limitation:Currently, in Cognos Analytics Dashboards (release 12.1.x), the Crosstab visualization lacks native inline Expand/Collapse functionality (the [+] and [-] icons) when querying purely relational data sources (e.g., a standard Star Schema on SQL Server). While users can use the "Drill down" feature, this entirely replaces the current view and loses the overall context. Alternatively, users can statically nest fields, but this creates massive, unreadable tables. Furthermore, even in older tools like Report Studio, expand/collapse was historically limited or difficult to achieve on columns. Dashboards need a modern, out-of-the-box Pivot-table experience.

Business Use Case / Justification:Business users and executives are accustomed to the fluid experience of Excel Pivot Tables, Analysis Studio (OLAP), or competitor BI tools. When analyzing a relational Star Schema, they expect to see a high-level summary matrix and selectively expand specific nodes to investigate details without losing the big picture. For example, a user wants to keep all "Regions" collapsed on the Rows, expand only "Europe" to see countries, and simultaneously expand the "2025" column to see Quarters, while keeping "2026" collapsed as a total. The lack of this inline interactivity forces users to create multiple separate visualizations or export to Excel, defeating the purpose of a dynamic Dashboard.

Desired Behavior:Enhance the Dashboard Crosstab visualization to support native inline Expand and Collapse:

  1. Provide dynamic [+] and [-] icons directly on the Crosstab headers when multiple data items are nested.
  2. Support this functionality for BOTH Rows and Columns axes.
  3. Make it work seamlessly on purely relational data sources (Star Schemas), leveraging existing Data Module Navigation Paths or simply by dragging multiple dimensional fields into the Row/Column slots.
  4. Allow users to selectively expand one specific node while keeping others collapsed on the same level.
Needed By Yesterday (Let's go already!)

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