Union of Custom Views

For the sole purpose of migration from IBM® Cognos® Series 7 security to an alternate security provider, Cognos Transformer allows you to place security objects from different namespaces within a single custom view.

IBM Cognos Analytics does not support secured PowerCubes that have been associated with multiple namespaces except during the testing of migration. We do not support the deployment of cubes secured against multiple namespaces within a production environment because IBM Cognos Analytics does not indicate to end users when they are not accessing the full view of the cube. For this reason, when you deploy cubes for use in production, ensure that they are secured against only one namespace by selecting the Restrict PowerCube authentication to a single namespace option in the Signon properties in the Publish PowerCube as Data Source and Package wizard.

A user can be a member of several user groups or roles, and can belong to multiple custom views. In IBM Cognos, when a user belongs to more than one group or role and the group, roles, or user belongs to multiple custom views, the cube opens with a union of all the custom views.

A union of custom views combines the access capabilities of its member custom views, but not their restrictions. The rules for determining what is shown in the cube as a result of a union of custom views are

  • that which is shown to an individual custom view is shown to the union

    That which is not shown to an individual custom view is the same as that which is not shown to the union.

  • a category is shown to the union if it is shown in at least one custom view
  • measure values, or cell values, are shown to the union if there is at least one custom view that sees all the categories in the cell domain

    A measure value, or cell value, is not shown to a union when none of the custom views in the union can see all the categories in the cell domain.

  • in a union of custom views, the root category shifts to the lowest common ancestor of all member custom views

These rules apply to all custom views in the union. The following examples illustrate the union of custom views in different scenarios.