Managing Cognos’ CSS Style Sheets

1.     Definition

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (the look and formatting) of a document written in any markup language, such as HTML or XML.

CSS is designed to separate the document content (written in HTML, XML, etc) from the document presentation.

The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). To learn more about language syntax, versions, etc, have a look at the previous website.

Cognos’ reports as a browser application is capable of using CSS style sheets in order to manage the final presentation.

2.     Scope

The aiming of this document is to show how to change Cognos’ default CSS style sheet.

3.     Cognos’ report default CSS style sheet

 Cognos’ reports use a default CSS style sheet that is common for any report. Nowadays, Cognos’ common CSS style sheet cannot be changed. This common CSS style sheet is “GlobalReportStyles.css”.

A different “GlobalReportStyles.css” is used for different porpoises:

-          Report designing

-          Report presentation

For these reasons, “GlobalReportStyles.css” is located in different Cognos’ application folders. All “GlobalReportStyles.css” must be changed:

- *D:\Apps\cognos\c84GA_TEST\reportstyles\GlobalReportStyles.css

- *D:\Apps\cognos\c84GA_TEST\webcontent\reportstyles\GlobalReportStyles.css

- *D:\Apps\cognos\c84GA_TEST\webcontent\schemas\GlobalReportStyles.css

- *D:\Apps\cognos\c84GA_TEST\bin\GlobalReportStyles.css

Depending on your user default language in Cognos’ environment, you will need to change an XML file that contains all the CSS classes names translated into different languages, reportstudio_XX.xml, where XX is the international language code.

For example, if you are using English as a default language this XML file will be “reportstudio_en.xml”. This XML file is located in the following path: “*D:\Apps\cognos\c84GA_TEST\webcontent\pat\res\”

*Cognos’ paths could be different in other Cognos’ installations.