Evan Ross Principal Automating Security in IBM Cognos 8 Transformer

IBM Services Partner  Expertise in the BI platform for more than 12 years  Cognos BI  Dashboarding  Reporting  Analysis  Scorecarding  Data Manager

Some of our Cognos Clients

Cognos security  Great Active Directory integration for Framework Manager  Functionality added in Transformer 8.3 for Custom Views

The problem:  Hospital ERP system  Complex security by department  Security table available in SQL  Framework Manager can easily connect to the SQL table  Hard to maintain in Transformer  Security Concerns  Timeliness

Standard hierarchies are easy… Corporate Canada EastWest USA South

…Complex Hierarchies are not!

Transformer views  Exclude  Not in cube  Cloak  In totals, not visible  Suppress  Hide level  Summarize  Hide lower levels  Apex  Hide upper levels

The manual method

What does the user see?  Two options:  Supress all categories at the lowest level and then unsuppress applicable categories  Apex on applicable categories

What is the difference? Location Business Unit Division Location Business Unit Division [Text]

The solution  Cognos 8.3 and higher allows for OLE automation of Transformer Model  Read SQL database and create User Views for each class  Tools needed:  Transformer  Visual Studio – free Express version is fine  Does NOT need Cognos SDK!

The next problem – Active Directory names!  Security tables uses login name  RossE  Cognos expects full name  Ross, Evan  The answer – link directly to Active Directory

Connecting to Active Directory  SQL Server supports linking directly to AD

Once connected, it’s a simple query… Insert Into L_activedirectory Select Cn, Samaccountname From Openquery(adsi, 'Select Cn, Samaccountname From ''Ldap:// Dc1'' Where Objectclass = ''User'' And Objectcategory = ''Person'‘ Order By Givenname') End

Process model to update security Clear Deletes all existing user views Add Reads database Creates new views Build Build cubes from batch file Copy and deploy cubes

VB.NET code – what does it do? For intX = 1 To dimension.DrillDowns.Item(1). Categories.Count Dim category As Category = dimension.DrillDowns.Item(1).Categories(intX) If category.Name = deptName Then view.SetViewStatus(category,xtrViewStatus.t rViewStatusApexAncestor) End If Next intX

The end result  No manual maintenance of Transformer security  Security preserved in all Cognos tools – relational, dimensionally modeled relational (DRM), and cubes  No more headaches for BI team!

Questions?  Evan Ross  