photo credit: rcourtie

Often I am asked to quickly diagnose problems in Cognos Report Studio reports or Microsoft SQL Server Integration Packages.  A trick that works equally well for both is to pull the XML code of the BI object.  This works especially well if you are trying to debug behaviour of certain variables or settings and are having trouble following the code within the development environment.  Object settings can be obscure or difficult to find in a GUI development tool but are often plain as day when you see them listed in XML code.

To pull XML code out of a Cognos Report Studio report, simply click “Copy Report to Clipboard” from the “Tools” menu.  Paste the results into a text editor.

To pull XML code out of a Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services package, simply open the .dtsx file with a text editor.

This works best for exploratory purposes and if you are looking for specific objects in the XML code (which can be easily searched).  I do not recommend editing XML code directly unless you are extremely careful and know exactly what you are doing – it is very easy to corrupt a file this way making it unreadable.  Once the problem is diagnosed and understood, changes can be made in the development tools.  But this method of code exploration has saved me much time in problem diagnosis.