Apply Report Themes to Existing Reports

To many companies, corporate identity is worth  as much as the good and/or service they provide.  In 2016, the Association of National Advertisers estimated that almost $600 Billion would be spend on brand activation.  This is a significant  investment into brand recognition.  With the advancements in Cognos Analytics report development, IBM wanted to provide a faster way for report developers to modify reports so that they reflect the current state of branding within a company.  Below is the step by step in how to implement a style theme into an existing Cognos report.  It assumes that the company has a theme already built with the Global Classes modified to reflect the desired output.

Open the Existing Report

The report administrator should start by opening the report they would like to modify.  They’ll need to open the report in Edit mode.

Select the report menu on the left and click Report at the top of the pop out menu.

Select the Properties button in the top, right corner to open the Properties pane.  A little ways down, there is a section for Style with the property of Theme.  Select the ellipsis that appears to the right of the property name.

Apply the Existing Theme

Left click on the Apply style to report check box and click the ellipsis next to the open box.

Navigate to the report that has the theme desired and select open.

Use the check boxes to remove custom styling from the current report as required.  Select the Refresh Now button to apply the theme changes.  Select OK when complete.

View the Report

Once that is completed, select the run button at the top and select Run HTML.  The style from the Global Classes used in the theme report are now applied to the existing report.

This will save developers many hours of manually recreating class properties to make reports look similar based on the branding requirements.

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