Folders versus namespaces

The most important thing to know about namespaces is that once you have begun authoring reports, any changes you make to the names of published namespaces will impact your IBM® Cognos® content. This is because changing the name of the namespace changes the IDs of the objects published in the metadata. Because the namespace is used as part of the object ID in IBM Cognos Framework Manager, each namespace must have a unique name in the model. Each object in a namespace must also have a unique name. Part of the strategy of star schema groups is placing shortcuts into a separate namespace, which automatically creates a unique ID for each object in the namespace. For relational databases, this allows us to use the same name for shortcuts to conformed dimensions in different star schema groups.

The next time you try to run a query, report, or analysis against the updated model, you get an error. If you need to rename the namespace that you have published, use Analyze Publish Impact to determine which reports are impacted.

Folders are much simpler than namespaces. They are purely for organizational purposes and do not impact object IDs or your content. You can create folders to organize objects by subject or functional area. This makes it easier for you to locate metadata, particularly in large projects.

The main drawback of folders is that they require unique names for all query subjects, dimensions, and shortcuts. Therefore, they are not ideal for containing shared objects.