Delivering Reports

You can deliver reports by saving them in the Public Folders area of IBM® Cognos® Connection or in a file system, sending them by email or to a mobile device, or printing them.

You can specify these options in the run options of the primary request that runs a report or report specification. Alternatively, you can use the secondary report » deliver(conversation, parameterValues, options) method to deliver a report or report specification after the primary request has completed. This is not as efficient as including the delivery options in the primary request.

The following table shows, for each delivery mode, which methods can use that mode, and the associated run options.

When you distribute reports as email attachments, they are not secured by the IBM Cognos security system.

To distribute reports to multiple recipients, create a distribution list. Distribution lists contain a collection of users, groups, roles, contacts, or other distribution lists.

If a recipient is not part of the IBM Cognos security system, you can create a contact for this person. The contacts you create can also be assigned as contacts for reports.

To create distribution lists and contacts, use the content » add(parentPath, objects, options) method.

You can burst reports so that each recipient receives a subset of the report data. For better performance, we recommend running a burst report as a job through the jobService, instead of running it directly to batchReportService.

You can change the burst options by modifying the report specification. The report specification includes the burst options as attributes of the burst element. For information about modifying report specifications, see Using report specifications.

You can schedule the distribution of your reports so recipients receive them regularly.

Regardless of how you distribute reports, recipients must have read permissions for the reports and traverse permissions for the folders that contain the reports.