Bursting a Report in Cognos Report Studio

Introduction: Bursting is used to distribute the contents of a report to a recipient or group of individuals or directory based on specific value.

For example, a Sales Report can be distributed to individual Sales Representatives through e-mail showing their individual Sales or showing their Sales according to Country.

Note 1: for bursting to work properly, a recipient or group on which you want to burst (for example, country or individual users) must be specified in the report.

Note 2: bursting is applied to a List report only. If you want to apply it for a crosstab, include the crosstab in the List cell and create a master-detail relationship in between them.

Burst Group: the report grouping item to be used to create Burst Instances. Eg: Region Code.

Burst Recipient: the IBM Cognos user or email address to which the Burst Instance are available or sent.

Burst Query: the query which drives the burst processing. This query contains the Burst Group data item. For lists, this is often the same query referenced by the list. As crosstab queries cannot be burst directly, the Burst Query is a list query used as a master to the crosstab detail query.

Recipient Query: the query which contains the Burst Recipient information. This can be same query as the Burst Query or a different one.

Recipient Data Item: the data item in the Recipient Query containing the Email address or CAMID of the Recipient.

Burst Master-Detail: used to link the Burst Query and the Recipient Query.

Burst Label: the data item used to provide a name for the Burst Instances. Eg: a report burst by Region Code might have a Burst Label of Region.

Burst Instance: a report result such as a PDF document with selected data to be distributed to the Burst Recipients.

Steps to Burst a report to Directory Entries:

a. Create a List report with the following fields.

b. Create a data item with the name BusrtRecipients and add the expression as shown below.

c. Go to File menu and click on Burst Options and select the options shown below. Save it with some name.

d. Go to the Cognos Connection where this report is saved. Click on Run with Options and again click on Advanced Options link in the right-hand side. Select Run in the background and enable Burst the report check box and click on Run.

e. You can find the outputs bursted on Sales region and saved to the directory.