Auto Refresh Report Studio Reports

Business Case:
Our executive team wanted a performance dashboard that will displayed on a big screen TV in the main conference room. They wanted to make sure that the report displays near real-time data without someone having to manually reload the report.

Environment: IBM Cognos 8.4.1 Report Studio.

Solution:
Our ETL process updates the data warehouse tables every 30 minutes.  I used Javascript to make the reports reload the data every 5 minutes. So the report can be left unattended, and since the report had "Report as of: " right on top, the executives will know when the report was last refreshed.

Code:
Note: The code given below has been tested for IBM Cognos 8.4.1 Report Studio. This code may not work with older versions of Cognos as is. Script was adopted from IBM Knowledge base document  

<script type="text/javascript">
// Licensed Material - Property of IBM
// © Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2011
var intval;
var fW = (typeof getFormWarpRequest == "function" ? getFormWarpRequest() : document.forms["formWarpRequest"]);
if ( !fW || fW == undefined)
{

    fW = ( formWarpRequest_THIS_ ? formWarpRequest_THIS_ : formWarpRequest_NS_ );

}
var preFix = "";
if (fW.elements["cv.id"])
{

    preFix = fW.elements["cv.id"].value;

}
var nameSpace = "oCV" + preFix;
if(intval!="")
{

    self.clearInterval(intval);
    intval="";

}

self["RunReportInterval"] = self.setInterval( nameSpace + ".getRV().RunReport()",'600000' );
intval = self["RunReportInterval"];
</script>  

Implementation:

• Create an HTML item at the end of the page
• Place the above script inside the HTML item.
• Report interval (300000 in the code above) is in milliseconds, so 300000 represents 300 seconds or 5 minutes.
• In the report header or footer, place a data item with report expression "AsOfDate()"