COGNOS Business Intelligence Series 7

Chapter 4: Deploy Cubes and Reports
Add a Folder
Add a Collection
A bold setting means that it no longer acquires settings from its parent, unless you reset those
settings by clicking the Reset or Reset All buttons. At the folder level, you can also force
descendant objects to acquire new settings by clicking the Reset Descendants button.
A folder is a container that can hold any combination of cubes, reports, or other folders. Use
folders to organize and administer related objects in a hierarchy.
Steps
1. In PowerPlay Enterprise - Server Administration, select a PowerPlay server or a folder.
2. From the Insert menu, click Folder.
3. In the Name box, type a name for the folder.
Tip: You can click the browse (...) button to locate a folder. If folders on mapped network
drives do not appear, type the UNC location in the Name box and do not use drive letters. For
example, \\server_name\source_location.
4. Specify other settings if required and click OK.
Note
• If you specify a folder data source, the folder becomes a collection (p. 40) and takes on special
characteristics.
• Use Drag and Drop to move folders and collections to another location on the same server. To
copy folders or collections, use CTRL and drag.
A collection is a folder with a physical directory as a data source. This property enables the
contents of a collection to be dynamically updated with the contents of the directory. Aside from
that, a collection is still a folder that contains child objects that acquire the folder settings by
default.
With a collection, you can add cubes and reports by copying the source .mdc and .ppx files to the
directory referenced by the collection. This offers a quick way to update an undetermined
collection of items on a production system.
Steps
1. In PowerPlay Enterprise - Server Administration, select a PowerPlay server or a server.
2. From the Insert menu, click Folder.
3. In the Name box, type a name for the folder.
4. In the Folder Source box, select a directory.
The directory should contain data source files (.mdc or .ppx), or other directories that contain
data source files.
5. Specify other settings if required and click OK.
Cubes and Reports
A substantial proportion of the tasks that you perform as a PowerPlay server administrator
probably entail distributing cubes and reports to your users. From an administrative perspective,
the cubes and reports are iconic representations of the data sources or mirror references of the
data sources. For example, when you add a cube, you don’t copy the actual cube data source (an
.mdc file) to a directory. Also, folders are virtual groupings of cubes, reports, or other folders, and
not representative of a directory. Therefore, any reference to cubes or reports in the following
sections also applies to the folders of cubes and reports.
40 Cognos PowerPlay (R)