Invoking a Cognos report, and accessing it's output

[crosato]

We are currently creating a new softtype of a WTDocument (called a CD), through a ChangeRequest workflow, but we're at a sticking point due to the fact that we are trying to create the content by running a report with Cognos. Basically the steps are: 1. CR created. 2. At a certain step, the user creates the CD with all the required metadata, but minus any content. 3. Once all the metadata is entered, we planned to use a WF expression to kick off a Cognos report. This report will use the CD's metadata to create the CD's primary content. 4. The CD's primary content will go through reviews, and blahblahblah. We just started looking at Cognos, literally when this project started, and the closeset thing to training was a demo months ago. The part we are currently stuck on is simply if we can invoke Cognos behind the scenes, without user input, to run the report and save the output to a temp location where we grab it and load it to the CD as the content. Is running a Cognos report behind the scenes even possible? It seems the more we look into it, that it requires user interaction at report runtime.

[BruceHulse]

I've attached starter files that show how to create a URL to invoke a Cognos Report. They are both intended to be connected to the report as the input page (from the Edit Report action in the Site/Reports page). NoPrompt just takes the parameters supplied by Windchill (and they do vary based on which one of the contexts you run the report from) and produces the needed Cognos URL and executes it. The PromptTemplate shows how to inject an actual prompt page when it's not enough to use just the parameters that Windchill provides (for instance, providing some sort of filter wildcard, state name, etc)