Overview of the Mashup Service

The IBM® Cognos® Mashup Service gives you a simplified programmatic access to IBM Cognos content. This service exposes the application content built with IBM Cognos products (such as reports, analyses, and PowerPlay® reports) as Web services, both SOAP and REST. This allows you to integrate IBM Cognos content into new client environments like mashups, BPM/BPEL workflow processes, desktop widgets, alternate visualizations like third party charting engines and rich Internet applications.

The Mashup Service transforms all IBM Cognos content into a single format called Layout Data (LDX) format. This format allows you to customize the presentation of IBM Cognos content using a simple API. The LDX format captures the logical structure of the content, as well as some formatting information. For example, list grouping, crosstab dimensions, data values and styling information are represented in an LDX instance.

The Mashup Service can transform LDX instances into in a variety of formats, including HTML, HTMLFragment, and JSON, to facilitate the integration of IBM Cognos content into your applications.

The Mashup Service allows you to access existing IBM Cognos content but does not provide any authoring functionality.

The following diagram illustrates how the Mashup Service interfaces link to the underlying IBM Cognos services, or providers; how they move in LDX format through selections, such as XPATH or ObjectID; and how they can be represented, such as in XML, HTML or JSON.