The domestic customer base using Cognos has reached a considerable scale. At the same time, WebSphere Portal, as an increasingly mature application integration and personalized customization product, has been accepted by enterprises with related needs. In this way, how to integrate Cognos into Portal has become a concern of more and more customers. Prior to this, Cognos and WebSphere Portal were two products with different characteristics and usage scenarios (for example, Cognos was installed based on Tomcat by default, and LDAP was not used. Portal is generally based on WAS and LDAP as user storage), so although it can be integrated, it is not thorough and there are few mature cases.

Recently, Cognos 8 has just been acquired by IBM, and the integration requirements of Cognos can be met in a deeper level.

So how to make Cognos more scalable? How to support LDAP? How to meet the needs of portal single sign-on? How to display the existing Cognos report intuitively in the portal? How to use the existing Cognos Portlet? How to develop Cognos custom Portlet? How to integrate Cognos into the portal more thoroughly is the problem to be expounded in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to use IBM WebSphere Portal products (hereinafter referred to as WP) to integrate Cognos products and realize single sign-on and unified information display.

Sample environment architecture and environment preparation

Figure 1. TOPOLOGY

Table 1. Software list

Software name remarks

IBM Cognos 8.2 report presentation tool

IBM WebSphere Application Server 6 Cognos application support platform, Cognos application and solution examples.

(Other optional products: products supported by Cognos, such as Tomcat)

IBM WebSphere Portal 6.0 portal integrated presentation platform

IBM HTTP Server 6.0 portal server, Cognos gateway

(Other optional products: IIS, Apache, etc. )

LDAP server Cognos and portal directory server.

(Optional products: TDS, etc. )

DB2 9.5 data storage

Configure the portal to use LDAP.

Install the portal site. In this example, WAS and Portal are installed under c:\ibm\, that is, c:\ibm\appserver, c:\ibm\portalserver and c:\ibm\profiles.

The Ldap server is installed in the C:\ldap directory.

Set the host name of LDAP to: ldap.ibm.com. The port number is 56274.

Create key users and groups on ldap: wpsadmin, wpsbind and wpadmins.

The basic DN is: dc=ibm, dc=com.

User suffixes are: ou=people, dc=ibm, dc=com.

Group suffixes are: ou=group, dc=ibm, dc=com.

The user prefix is: uid.

The group prefix is: cn.

Then use the above parameters and related tasks to enable the security of the portal.

IHS does Cognos gateway

Install Cognos Server8.2 and Cognos framework.

The default installation is to install Cognos8.2 in the directory C:\Cognos\C8, which is omitted here.

Frames are installed by default. Note that when installing, it should be said that the framework is installed in the same directory as Cognos Server. Then design several reports for testing.

Install IBM HTTP Server to the directory C:\IBM\HTTPServer.

After the installation is completed, modify .cognos.cps.auth.cpstrustedsignon, paying attention to case sensitivity.

Figure 6. Customize Java provider namespace configuration