Our Cognos reports have evolved organically with poor governance over structures and access controls. Additionally, developers have moved into and out of the area so we do not have reliable corporate memory. As a preliminary step to developing some governance and structure to our reporting hierarchy and security I need to create a table of all of the reports we have developed and groups/roles available to access each of those reports. a flat file extract would be a satisfactory starting point. But accessing this information from Cognos is not straightforward. I can't even find a suitable forum to ask questions so I'm hoping this community can point me to suitable documentation and/or fora where I might be able to find related information. Can anybody point me in the right direction please? Greg
The information must be in some kind of database in the back end of Cognos, but I suspect it might be column based, or locked down somehow because I can't discover a way to extract the information I want.
Lots of unknowns here, so my assumptions...
You are using IBM Cognos Analytics 11.2.4. (the current Long Term Support release)
The Content Store database is running on SQL Server 2016 or later.
You're running Cognos on prem.
You are an administrator on the Cognos server and in the Cognos system.
IBM Cognos Analytics stores nearly everything in its Content Store database. The name and location of the database can be found in Cognos Configuration. But that may not help much because there is no official documentation for it. It can take years to understand where to find the data and how to decode some of it. And IBM doesn't support accessing the Content Store directly.
But there are acceptable methods for accessing the data:
You can write one or more programs in C# or Java to leverage the Cognos SDK to extract what you need.
You may be able to use the Cognos REST API to get what you need.
There are 3rd party ($$$) tools (like MetaManager and Motio PI/CI) that leverage the Cognos SDK that may be able to provide what you need.
Also, this type of question may be seen as unsuitable (off topic?) on Stack Overflow. Cognoise is a discussion forum for Cognos users. The discussion there is more free-form so you won't get the kind of negative responses that the more rigid rules on StackOverflow tend to produce when you're looking for documentation and vendor products.