IBM Cognos 10 Framework Manager: Full of practical instructions and expert know-how, this book continues where the official manual ends, taking you from the basics into the more advanced features of IBM Cognos Framework Manager in clear, progressive steps.

The Project Viewer pane shows the project in a hierarchical view. You can use the Project Viewer pane to view, modify, and create objects.

The Project Viewer pane uses various icons to represent different types of objects; these icons are described in more detail in the IBM Cognos documentation.

Within this pane, the main objects are grouped in the project model. The Project Viewer pane starts with the project at the top level; additional levels within the project may be expanded by clicking on the + sign beside each level.

Within the Project Viewer panel, you can find the following areas:

The Explorer tab shows the contents of a project, similar to any filesystem. If you have a large number of objects in a project, it may be easier to locate them in the Explorer tab.

To go to the Explorer tab, click on the Explorer label in the central project work area.

You can use the Explorer tab to view, create, and modify objects and relationships. You can also create folders and namespaces to group objects.

The Diagram tab shows the relationships between objects in a project.

To go to the Diagram tab, click on the Diagram label in the central project work area.

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Relationships between the objects are shown with lines with cardinality notation. You can expand objects and namespaces to show the object hierarchy and the relationship between objects. In the Diagram tab, you can perform any of the following tasks:

The Dimension Map tab can be used to view, create, and modify hierarchies and levels for any dimension you have selected in Project Viewer. You can also view and modify the scope relationships.

To open the Dimension Map tab, click on the Dimension label in the central project work area:

The Measures and Attributes tabs will be displayed after you click on the Dimension Map tab. The Measures tab can be used to view or modify all the measures and scope relationships that are available in the model. The Attributes tab can be used to view or modify the role of the selected query item.

The Properties pane shows the properties of the object, or objects that you last selected in the other panes of the tabs within the panes.

Default properties are set during import of your metadata, and some property values can later be modified during modeling. You can use the Properties pane to add, modify, or delete the properties of selected objects.

You can modify the properties for a single object or multiple objects at the same time.

Framework Manager shows only the properties that are common to all the selected objects. You can apply a property value to multiple objects by clicking on the arrow to the right of the property and dragging the highlighted area over the properties to which you want to apply that value.

The Tools pane contains the Summary tab, the Search tab, and the Dependencies tab.

The Tools pane contains the Summary tab, the Search tab, and the Dependencies tab. The following screenshot show the Tools pane:

The Summary tab is divided into three sections. At the top, the Project section shows the design language and the active language. The design language is chosen at the start of a new project and cannot be changed; the active language may be changed by selecting a new language from the drop-down list.

The second section is the Statistics section. You can select any object from the Project Viewer to see various statistics about the chosen item. By default, if you do not select an item from the Project Viewer, the statistics are shown for the whole project.

The final section in the Summary tab shows actions that are available for the selected object.

When you have a large project open, it can sometimes be difficult to locate the items that you need. You can use the Search tab to quickly find any objects within your open model.

Enter the text you want to search for into the search box and click on the Search button.

Use the double down arrow button to expand the search to include things such as the following:

By default the search uses the following criteria:

The Dependencies tab shows all the objects that are dependent on the selected item. To use the Dependencies tab, select any item from the Project Viewer pane, and drag-and-drop it to the upper pane of the Dependencies tab; all the dependent objects will be displayed in the lower pane of the Dependencies tab.

Some limited functionality is available through the toolbar. From the toolbar you can perform the following tasks: