Used by more than 23,000 companies globally, IBM’s Cognos software products have been consistent leaders in the performance management software niche of the industry since 2005. The Cognos Business Suite includes a multitude of individual software products, all designed to allow everyday individuals to utilize Cognos to build insightful reporting from otherwise complicated and overwhelming business data. Another great thing about Cognos is that third-party components can often be integrated into this Business Intelligence environment to leverage even more features for greater power over corporate data streams. Barcode technology provides the unique ability for businesses to easily identify documents, equipment, inventory and more for the purpose of tracking or reducing the probability of human error, which can cost companies a great deal of money overall.
So, how can companies take advantage of barcode technology and start saving time and money? IDAutomation provides a range of software products that allow users to generate barcodes in many Business Intelligence environments including Cognos. Our Cognos Barcode Integration Guide outlines three of the best solutions for this powerful software suite of applications:
Cognos Barcode Font Integration
Barcode fonts should be installed on the Report Server while the PDF or HTML document is generated. The font itself must also live on the local machine that is being used to view the report, or else the barcode will not be displayed. The easiest barcode fonts to use within Cognos are
Code 39 or
Codabar, although these are only capable of dependably encoding upwards of 13 characters in total. Higher-density barcode types such as
Code 128 may possibly be generated if used in conjunction with one of our free
barcode font encoder tools.
Cognos Barcode Java Integration
IDAutomation’s
Java Barcode Package contains the java components necessary for creating barcode images in any Cognos-supported platform. This is the preferred method for developers who have a deeper understanding of implementing Java components, and produces high-quality images for many different barcode types including Code 39, Code 128, Intelligent Mail, QR Code, Data Matrix, PDF417, GS1 DataBar and many others.
Cognos Barcode Streaming Integration
IDAutomation’s Hosted Dynamic Barcode Image Generator is a hosted service that allows users to
stream barcodes into Cognos by referencing an image URL in much the same way as our Java integration above. This is arguably the most effective method for users to stream dynamic data from an external URL.
