- Design your presentation view so that your users will naturally do the right thing, based on the names of the objects, and where they appear in the tree structure.
- Keep it simple. Complexity makes things hard to understand and predict. If you can't understand the result, you've probably outsmarted yourself.
- Present a star schema view to report authors. Build it by following the arrows.
- Where complexity is unavoidable, encapsulate it in a model query subject, and test that query subject thoroughly. Use query item folders inside it where necessary to make clear the purpose of each item and the relationships between them.
- Make sure that the model information is complete. When in doubt, specify all dimensional information.
- Whenever you have to make the model lie about the underlying data, make sure you've thought out the consequences.
- Use the Description and Screen Tip properties help yourself and your users to understand things that otherwise may not be obvious.
- Be careful what you expose. In particular, avoid directly exposing parts of the data source modelling layer that contain multiple join paths, or are otherwise incompletely modelled.
- Test thoroughly.
Cognos Framework Manager modelling best practices
