Enable Communication Between Cognos Portlets

You can enable portlet-to-portlet communication so that the portlets can interact. For example, you can use this functionality when you want to navigate published IBM® Cognos® reports and view the selected reports on the same page.

This functionality applies only to Cognos portlets and works between portlets of different groups. For example, the IBM Cognos Metric List portlet can communicate with the IBM Cognos Viewer portlet. One portlet is a target portlet, and the remaining portlets are source portlets. The results of actions in the source portlets are shown in the associated target portlets.

Portlets in different pages can communicate between themselves.

You can enable portlet-to-portlet communication between the following source and target portlets.

Table 1. Portlet to portlet communication, source and target portlets
Source portlet	Target portlet
IBM Cognos Navigator	IBM Cognos Viewer
IBM Cognos Search	IBM Cognos Viewer
IBM Cognos Viewer	IBM Cognos Viewer
IBM Cognos Metric List	IBM Cognos Viewer IBM Cognos History Chart IBM Cognos Impact Diagram
IBM Cognos Impact Diagram	IBM Cognos Viewer IBM Cognos History Chart
IBM Cognos Custom Diagram	IBM Cognos Viewer IBM Cognos Metric List IBM Cognos History Chart
Bookmarks Viewer	HTML Viewer
Image Viewer	HTML Viewer
RSS Viewer	HTML Viewer

To enable this functionality, you specify a channel name in the target portlet and refer to this name in the associated source portlets.

For more information about Cognos portlets, see Cognos portlet use with other portals.

Procedure

Go to the page or the dashboard that contains the portlets for which you want to enable portlet-to-portlet communication.
Click the edit button in the portlet title bar.
For the channel property, type the name you want.
The name can contain letters, numbers, and underscore (_) characters, but must not contain any spaces. For example, Cognos, Cognos_Portlets, CognosPortlets are valid names.

Note: The boxes where you type the channel name have different labels in different portlets. For example, Channel, Portlets using channel, or In a destination portlet.
Click OK.
Repeat the steps for each portlet that you want to broadcast on the same channel.
Ensure that you type the same channel name.