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Does anyone know if there is any tool or a way to apply automated unit testing in report studio and/or framework manager ?

When some regression tests are required and I need to run report by report, on the traditional way, it really bothers me.

Best regards,

Evandro

Evandro
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    Which version are you using? In Cognos 8+ versions, we have life cycle manager. In version 8, it was little buggy but Cognos 10+ they have enhanced a lot. It could be readily use it for unit testing, comparison of two outputs, etc. – arunpandiyarajhen Aug 22 '14 at 14:41

3 Answers3

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There is such a tool - take a look at MotioCI. Its primary focus is on automated testing, version control, and release management for Cognos environments.

On the automated testing side, you can setup assertions for Cognos reports which will ensure :

  • The execution time of the report is within a certain threshold (e.g. "running this report, with these parameters should always complete in 20 seconds or less")
  • The report is producing the expected output
  • The report is adhering to established organizational standards with regards to fonts, color schemes, allowed images, etc.
  • Etc.

You can setup MotioCI tests to be run at periodic intervals (e.g. every 4 hours) in your development environment, and configure it to notify you if something starts to fail. This gives you early warning when a report starts to diverge from its expected output or performance levels.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg for implementing Continuous Integration for Cognos BI environments (CI is a central theme in pretty much every Agile Methodology).

For more information on MotioCI and automated testing in Cognos, see :

Automated Cognos Testing

To read more about Continuous Integration for Business Intelligence, take a look at the following whitepaper :

Continuous Integration for Business Intelligence

Cheers,

Lance

Lance
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    I think it would be better if you qualified your post with the fact that you are the CTO at Motio. – tsells Feb 26 '15 at 01:12
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One possibility is to use Selenium to test the HTML output of your reports. Selenium is non-trivial to set up but it is fairly widely known/used/supported.

wikipedia article on Selenium

rossdavidh
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There are no tools in the standard "out-of-the-box" configuration to do anything automated in Cognos 8 (it seems). However, in theory the Cognos 8 SDK could be leveraged to write and run automated unit tests for reports, using something like JUnit. Also, if you are mainly testing how changes to your database affect the result sets of the reports/queries, you could extract the SQL from each report and run automated tests separate from the Cognos environment.

jamz
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