Saturday, August 26, 2006

Dynamic Path in Cognos Planning Analyst

As a normal practice we are used to specify absolute path for a File Maps in Cognos Planning Analyst. Disadvantage of specifying Absolute path for File Map is as follows:-
- After moving from Development Server to Production Server we will have to remap all the Flat Files to individual File Maps.
As a Best practice we can specify Dynamic Path to File Maps. For this all the required files has to be kept under a folder in the Specific Library under which the file maps will be stored.
For E.g.
If you have a filemap for the flat file PersonnelCost.csv in library Common, create a folder Datafiles in Common and copy the PersonnelCost.csv in the Datafiles folder.And give the path of the File map as follows

{LIB}\DataFiles\Personnel Cost.csv

Here Analyst automatically detects the path of the Library on the Server and hence the path of the flat file.But care should be taken that the flat file has to be in the same library folder for it to detect the path automatically.The same rule applies if one has given flat file to update D-List.