It's not a bug, It's a feature... that costs a lot of time

Since the new IBM Cognos 10.2 version came out, i was trying to migrate old versions from my clients to 10.2. 

All reports upgraded fine (not perfect, but that will do) until my customers Cognos techinician detected an issue where 4 reports wouldn't generate correctly. All these reports generate with Excel 2007 output and the customer was complaining about not being able to open the generated .xlsx file as it usually would.

After opening one of the reports (our customer still has the Excel 2003, and a converter to open the newer formats, and no issues with reports generated from v8.4.1) the file conversion kept failing and no document was opened.

Ran the report for Excel 2002 format and it ran OK, taking into account all the limitations of this file version - content would not keep its right position on the page and charts would get all stacked up.

Moving the file to my computer, i tested the document on Excel 2013, and all i got was a series of warnings like these:

After that, the document opens and my sheet tab displays some of the sheet titles named 'Recovered_Sheet#':

Have you noticed that some appear as Recovered until Page 10. 

This was odd, specially because the first page - the index - was rendering fine. 

WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON WITH THESE PAGES????? 

Well, after some hours (that would almost total a full day) of testing, redoing Master-Detail Relationships, rebuildig sets, and research on the internet - between Google and IBM Cognos Support Portal - and after lots of keywords i finally got to this technote from IBM. 

Remember that this report ran fine on v8.4

Problem(Abstract)
When opening Excel outputs an error is displayed.
If the output is 2002 it is ok after Excel opens.
If the output is 2007 then Excel tabs will be named Recovered_SheetX


Symptom

Errors when opening Excel outputs:

The file you are trying to open, 'filename', is in a different format than specified by the file extension. Verify that the file is not corrupted and is from a trusted source before opening the file. Do you want to open the file now?
---
or
---
Excel found unreadable content in 'filename'. Do you want to recover the contents of this workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.

This was exactly my problem. When i looked at the solution i could not believe what my eyes were seeing:


Cause

The report name page is too short.

WHAAAAAAAT????

How is data corruption in a file is related to a sheet title character count?? (specially when that was not a problem on previous versions)

Why is this 'product feature' not announced in the release notes directly??

Why isn't this page searchable from google??

So the name of the report page in Report Studio was too small (smaller than 5 characters). Opened the report, changed the page name to a bigger title and...

Voilá! It generated perfectly.In all my 5 year of cognos this was the most bizarre thing that happened to me... that led to the most time consuming effort to fix and that could potentially compromise an upgrade project.

Hope this helps anyone who is facing the same issue.

Thanks for reading. Below i leave the original link to the IBM support Portal:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21622333

Zee

Pentaho Meeting 2009 @ Barcelona

Finally started working today, after arriving from Barcelona, where i attended the Pentaho Community Meeting 2009. Gotta say i was surprised by the amount of people i met there (and, unfortunately, didn't had the chance to chat with all of them), from almost every corner of the world.

Being this my first experience with an opensource community, i was able to actually get to know 'the faces behind the nicknames', and it was amazing to see how opensource software like Pentaho can gather so many passionate people.

New ideas arose from that meeting, and perhaps a new personal project for me: now, all i need to do is investigate, learn, code and geek around Pentaho and its tools to see its viability, as well as to continue listening to the valuable comments from the community members (from which i've already learned so much).

Looking forward to see you all next year, and kudos to Tom Barber for making it all happen.