This Readme document contains late-breaking information about Upfront, the Web portal normally used in Cognos Enterprise solutions.
Note: The Upfront component is not used with Cognos 8.
Look here for readme information about closely-related components:
The Readme document also contains information about Features No Longer Supported in this release and those that will not be supported in subsequent releases.
To see Readme updates and information about deploying Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence products, go to the Cognos support site (http://support.cognos.com).
The following information will be added to the Impromptu Web Reports section of the Upfront Developer Guide, when this document is next reissued.
To automate prompt caching and refresh, your script must enable the setstatic and refreshcachedprompts attributes for all items in your Upfront NewsBox. You apply the reportattributes element type in the same way as you use runaction, executing it against all reports in your published report set.
Note: A setstatic declaration is not needed if this attribute is already set (value: 1). But if it is not set, refreshcachedprompts cannot be set.
The following example sets both required attributes:
UpfrontCmd.exe -u administrator -p "" -sservername:port"<SetNewsItemProperties>
<Id>53465478b4d211d8bac8e210e710e99f</Id>
<Provider>
<pair><name>setstatic</name><value>1</value></pair>
<pair><name>refreshcachedprompts</name><value>1</value></pair>
</Provider>
</SetNewsItemProperties>"<?
On execution of the above command, the following output is produced:
xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252" standalone="yes"?>
<Resultxmlns="http://developer.cognos.com/schemas/upfront/">
<Standard_ResultResultCode="Success"></Standard_Result>
<NumberOfObjectsModified>1</NumberOfObjectsModified>
</Result>
To see which NewsItems have report prompts, use DescribeNewsItem and include the lines relevant to your request, as excerpted below:
<DescribeNewsItem RequestId="1">
<Id><%id%></Id>
<module name="provider">
<mod>
<reporthasprompts type="reportattributes"/>
<runaction type="runactions.run"/>
<reportfilename type="reportattributes"/>
</mod>
</module>
</DescribeNewsItem>
Note: Setting these two attributes is equivalent to selecting the Cache Picklist Prompt Values and Refresh Cached check boxes on the Web interface, but the second box will never appear selected on the UI. Instead, to verify that your script has refreshed the cache, try running a report, noting the execution time, changing a cached value, and then running the report again. The new value should be picked up (refresh is working) and there should be a gain in performance (caching is set).
The Upfront dispatcher should be stopped prior to the database restore. Cognos does not support a "hot" restore of the Upfront datastore. This means that all users must be logged off and the Upfront dispatcher shut down.
If a hot restore of the Upfront datastore is performed, unexpected errors may occur.
Using Actions, Select a Version to view an uploaded file may cause errors if that file includes characters that are not part of the ASCII character set.
This problem occurs on all platforms when the file is viewed using Internet Explorer. The problem affects all languages that use characters outside of the ASCII character set.
The problem occurs when the Internet Explorer setting "Always send URLs as UTF-8 (requires restart)" is enabled and the file name is in the current language. The browser encodes the file name in UTF-8 and passes this to the Upfront File Manager. The file name no longer matches the uploaded file name.
To avoid this problem, you must turn off the "Always send URLs as UTF-8 (requires restart)" setting in Internet Explorer. This setting, which is enabled by default, is found in Internet Explorer in Tools, Internet Settings, Advanced.
To reduce image duplication, an additional image directory was added for Upfront. This directory stores images shared between themes and languages. The new image storage scheme is as follows:
This change may cause problems with template customizations. The custom images may be missing, or the Upfront standard images may appear instead of the custom images.
The following list specifies situations in which the problems may occur and workarounds for the problems:
Accessibility references in existing localized documentation imply that the accessibility features have been localized. To date, the accessibility features are limited to English, with the exception of the Upfront Accessible theme, which was recently made available in French. Currently, accessibility features are not available in any other localized products.
In some localized versions of the Web Portal User Guide (HTML Help), the context-sensitive links for the IWR Reference Section may not work correctly. This means that clicking the Help button in an IWR report may bring up the incorrect topic.
To correct this problem, click the Contents tab in the Help window, scroll down to the Impromptu Web Reports Reference section and click the topic for the information you require.
In the Installation Guide under Upgrading Upfront, the following text appears in the Verify That Themes Are Assigned to Users (optional) task:
"The upgrade process maintains the assignment of themes to users. Users who were assigned a custom theme in the previous version of Upfront are assigned the same theme after upgrading. Users who were assigned the default Upfront 7.0 theme (standard70) or Upfront 7.1 theme (standard71) are assigned to the default Upfront 7.3 theme (standard73) after the upgrade."
The standard73 theme is not available in Upfront 7.3.
Users who were assigned the default Upfront 7.0 theme (standard70) or Upfront 7.1 theme (standard71) maintain their assigned themes after the upgrade.
When running Cognos Series 7 and Upfront on HP-UX, the Upfront database may crash with an out-of-memory error. This issue has been seen in testing situations where there were more than 40,000 items in the database.
On HP-UX, there are environmental variables that make the best use of the system's memory resources. HP-UX uses Arenas. These are used to reduce memory contention and improve performance.
When the following environmental setting are applied, the database does not unexpectedly shutdown and no known performance degradations result.
If the same issue with the database persists, the following settings can be applied. However, when applied, performance may suffer slightly.
The default value is _M_ARENA_OPTS=8:32.