Cognos report - when add attendees other expense types vanish

[CassieWilde]

Hi all, 

Sorry I am very new to reporting and was wondering if anyone could help. I am creating a basic report to report on expenses occurred by a single team in our company. For the business meals category I would like to add a column for the attendees names but when I add this column the report now only reports on the singular expense type where there are attendees and leaves out all other expense types. Is there a way I can set up the report to show all expense types for the team but show the attendee names for the relevant expense types where there will be attendees. Sorry again if I am missing something very basic.

Thanks

Cassie

[KevinD]

@CassieWilde yes you can. Let me explain what is happening for you (maybe you want to know) and anyone else who reads this post. When building reports, think of each data item as a "condition". So, when you add Attendee Name as a data item, all individual meals do not meet the condition of having an attendee so they are filtered out of the data results. 

Now, to accomplish what you are doing, you can either build a report with a join, which is a bit complicated or a report that is a Master Detail report, which is less complicated. Examples of each can be found in this training guide: Business Intelligence Report Manual. 

The Join example in the guide I believe is how to show meals with both attendees and no attendees (individual meals). 

Note: The above manual and Join is dependent on your company having the Business Intelligence offering. If you do not have this offering, then you will not be able to build the report. You would need to submit a Support Ticket to get the report built, which I believe would incur a cost.