Zoomable scatter chart in Cognos 8/10 Report studio

Haven't we all been in the situation when a scatter chart meant to show all customers or products displays one big blob of dots? Cognos has not managed so far to create a zoomable scatter chart thus living in a stone age through out version 8. Did you just get the idea that maybe they've managed to pull that off in the 10 series? Dream on! Or read on.

Here is a workaround to make your chart zoomable.



We will be using following ingredients:
 - a parameter;
 - a prompt;
 - maximum sales value;
 - a filter.

Basic idea is to create a set of static promt values which will be used to divide Max sales by customer. This divided value can then be used as query filter to eliminate values higher than Max divided by ?zoom? thus eliminating the highest values and closing into the details of the blob.

Lets walk through this step by step.

Start with the creating a drop down prompt (or any other kind of value prompt that fits your design). Fill in static choices (for this example I used 1;10;100;1000). Add default value of 1. Make it auto submit.

Now create a query. For my example I am going to show Net Sales and Profit by customer in the scatter chart. Create those items. In addition, I need to calculate the highest sales value and create the filter which will act as the zoom function.

The default value of 1 for parameter ?Zoom? makes sure that by default all values are included. However, once we select 100, the scatter chart will show only customers that buy for 100 times less than your biggest customer, thus decreasing the number of customers in the set and artificially zooming into the blob of dots closer to 0.

Here are some examples generated in Cognos 10. First, the initial state with defaulted zoom level of 1:

And then the same chart after zooming in a 1000 times:

There is way more things to see when you get closer to the detail.

As a reload of the report is required every time a user zooms, I would guess the best place to use these zoom parameters are within dashboards as there you can add a small report with just one chart in it and only that one piece of dashboard will be updated.

One prerequisite for this to work is responsive environment. Otherwise every time your user zooms she will have to stare at "Your report is being generated" sand clock... And your zoom function will be forgotten quicker than you ever thought...

Have fun zooming ;)
M.

P.S. don't forget to remove those grid lines ;)