How to Add a Footer to a Group of Cognos Reports – Quontra Solutions

Let’s say you need to add the following confidentiality statement to each of your footers in dozens of existing Cognos reports:  “The information contained within this report is proprietary and confidential. No part of this report may be disclosed in any manner to a third party without prior written consent.”

By using the Cognos admin tool, MotioPI Pro, updating the footers in multiple Cognos reports can be accomplished in just a few, short steps with the Templatizer feature!

Step 1:   Update a single Cognos report’s footer in Report Studio with the confidentiality statement. This report will become our “template.”

Step 2:   Load the updated template report in the MotioPI Pro Templatizer panel.  As you can see here, we have selected Main Training Report’s footer to Templatize.  I have selected to add it, or barring that, replace all pre-existing footers.  To do this, simply press the green “plus” button or the blue button adjacent to it, adorned with two horizontal arrows.  The latter of the two signifies the “replace”, while the former signifies the “add.”

Step 2.5:  In order to add the footer to all pages, you must click the small “cog” next to the add/replace buttons, which opens up the “advanced” – mode shown below.  The checkbox at the top will templatize the footer to all pages; that is exactly what we want.  Go ahead and check that, and then click “ok.”  You’ll see the yellow stars appear over the add/replace buttons, as they are in the picture above.

Step 3:  Choose the target Cognos reports you want to add/replace the confidentiality footer.  Here I have selected 10 files (listed in the bottom window) to templatize.  If I had to do this operation manually, it would be utterly tedious and obnoxious.  Thankfully, MotioPI Pro can do it for you!

Step 4:  Click the “preview” button.  Here you will see a list of all target reports.  On the bottom, you see a detailed table of exactly what will be added to all of the Cognos reports.  Once you are ready to be amazed, click the “run” button, and watch as MotioPI Pro takes over.

Step 5: Take a break!  You just did hours of work in mere minutes with the help of MotioPI Professional.  Below is one of the target Cognos reports successfully updated with the new footer.