Hide Toolbar Buttons in Cognos Viewer

Business Case:
Report Author wants to hide the individual toolbar buttons found in Cognos Viewer or the entire toolbar.

Environment: IBM Cognos 8, Report Studio, Javascript, HTML Format, Internet Explorer/Mozilla Firefox.

Examples:
There are many reasons why a report author might want to hide the buttons or the toolbar. For example, if a report is a drill through target report, then the users shouldn't be able to run the report again from within the cognos viewer as parameters will not be passed.

Another example is, if the drill through report can be viewed only in one format, then the author might want to hide the Report Formats button.

Implementation:
The toolbar inside the Cognos Viewer and it's buttons are nothing but HTML elements. So, we can use Javascript to hide them. There are two different scripts that can be used to achieve this.

Script 1 - Use IBM's built in Object Names and Methods to hide individual elements:
IBM provides this script in their knowledge base. I am using a shorter and slightly modified version of this script here:

<script language="JavaScript">
// Licensed Material - Property of IBM
// © Copyright IBM Corporation 2003, 2009

function hideKeepVersion(){
  document.getElementById("_NS_keepThisVersion").style.display = "none";
}

var tbCurrent = null;
var hideTheKeepVersionButton = true;
var y=getFormWarpRequest().elements["cv.id"];

// RS means it has been launched from Report Studio
// _NS_ means it has been launched from Cognos Connection
if(y.value == "RS")
  tbCurrent = oCVRS.rvMainWnd.getToolbar();
else
  tbCurrent = oCV_NS_.rvMainWnd.getToolbar();

if(y.value == "_NS_" && hideTheKeepVersionButton)
  setTimeout("hideKeepVersion()","50");

var tbItems = tbCurrent.m_items;

for (var item in tbItems){
  // Hide Drill Up and Drill Down Buttons
  if (tbItems[item].m_id == y.value + 'drillUp' || tbItems[item].m_id == y.value + 'drillDown')
  {
    tbItems[item].hide();
  }

  // Hide Open With Button
  if (tbItems[item].m_id == y.value + 'openWith')
  {
    tbItems[item].hide();
  }

  // Hide Run Report Button
  if (tbItems[item].m_id == y.value + 'runReport'){
    tbItems[item].hide();
  }

}
</script>

• The advantage of this script is that it provides a handle for each of the toolbar buttons individually.
• On the flip side, since these are built in objects, it doesn't give much room for tweaking or manipulating and it's more of a use as is approach.
• Link to IBM Knowledge base Article.

Script 2 - Use HTML DOM objects to hide the toolbar:
This is a much simpler script. The script scans the HTML page and looks for the toolbar. It then hides the toolbar completely.

<script type="text/javascript">
var tables = document.getElementsByTagName("table");
var tds = document.getElementsByTagName("td");

for (var i=0;i<tds.length;i++){
  if(tds[i].id.indexOf("CVToolbar") == 0){
    alert("Found ToolBar: " + tds[i].id + " - " + tds[i].id.indexOf("CVToolbar"));
    tds[i].style.display = 'none';
  }
}
</script>

How to use the scripts:

• Create an HTML element at the end of the page and place the script in there.
• The script will work in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.