Cognos : create custom groups in report studio - cognos

Question

I am new to Cognos and I know SQL but it seems I can’t figure out cognos logic for some basic stuff. It's been two days I am trying and I have been looking all over the internet without finding anything.
Here’s the problem.
I have a Dimension Product that has two dimensions under it: type of product and article (in this order, article is below type of product in terms of hierarchy).
Let’s simplify and say I have this table:
Product line | Article | Sales
-------------------------------
Shoes | Article1 | 1000
| Article2 | 2000
| Article3 | 10
| Article4 | 20
| Article5 | 30
Bags | Article6 | 100
| Article7 | 100
| Article8 | 30
Balls | Article9 | 50
| Article10 | 50
I want to display the sales per product line and per article for article1 and article2 and the sales per product line only for the rest.
I want my final result to look like this:
Product line | Article | Sales
-------------------------------
Shoes | Article1 | 1000
| Article2 | 2000
| Other | 60
Bags | Other | 330
Balls | Other | 100
I created an elementary data with the following expression “if [article-name] in (‘article1’,’article2’) then ([article-name]) else (‘other’) but it gives me this:
Product line | ArticleNEW| Sales
-------------------------------
Shoes | Article1 | 1000
| Article2 | 2000
| Other | 10
| Other | 20
| Other | 30
Bags | Other | 100
| Other | 100
| Other | 30
Balls | Other | 50
| Other | 50
I thought Cognos would group by automatically but it seems it does not when you create a new expression….
Please note that I have thousands of articles and I cannot create a data that would say “article3+article4+article5 etc.”.
If anyone has an idea on this, it would be great!
Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

I believe the issue is with the model. If you have access to Framework Manager and the project/metadata, this would change my answer
Try this method: 3 queries
1) Query 1 just have product line and article
2) Query 2 product line, article, sales
3) Next go to queries, then tool box, find the join.
Drag that over. There will be spots to add query 1 and query 2
In the middle is how you define the join
Connect the product line and article (there should be a button to add links so you should have 2 lines). This will be 1 to many (1.1 to 1.n). The first part represents the type of join, 1 being inner, 0 being outer. The second part is the relationship (either 1 or n for many).
We can group by query 1 and aggregate query 2 the way we want
Double click on query 3 and drag the data items (from query 1 and query 2)
Grab sales from query 2, and everything else from query 1
Now you should be able to set the aggregate property for Sales (either total or sum)