Generic versus report-specific applications

When developing applications using the SOAP interface, you can choose between a generic set of methods and classes that can be used with any IBM® Cognos® Analytics report, or a set of methods and classes that are specific to a particular report.

The generic methods are suitable when you use the LDX report format (see Understanding the Layout Data format) while the report-specific methods are suitable when you use the Simple report format (see Understanding the Simple format). One disadvantage of using the LDX report format is that the highly nested structure of LDX documents requires complex commands to access report data. However, the report-specific methods provide shortcuts to accessing report data, which results in less complex applications. For more information, see Retrieving report data.