Cognos Interview Preparation

Hi All,
I am back. i thought of preparing for some technical interviews. Since i have been into IT field last 2 yrs, Its worth to get thorough in one. So i started of with cognos Reportnet. Following are sone Interview Questions i collected from net.

1) What is the difference between macros and prompt?
Macro No Idea, Prompt is to filter the data.
2) WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIST REPORT AND CROSSTAB REPORT?
List report show data in rows and columns versus a crosstab report show data in grids with dimension in rows and columns and measures in cells or in the intersection points.
3) Give me some examples for Lifecycle reporting, I mean which lifecycle we will use for reporting?
There is no specific reporting lifecycle. We can generate the reports from datawarehouse/data marts or we can generate the reports directly from OLTP systems.
wt i mean generating reports from OLTP systems is Loading data into one system and generating the reports. But this is not recommended.
This will depends on the business.
4) How we check the errors before running the report?
Validate the report icon in the tool bar
5) What is the difference between group and association?
Group - It Eliminates the Duplicate values from the report break the columns it’s having a one to many relationship.
Association- It Eliminates the Duplicate values from the report and its having one-one relationship....
6) What is IQD? What is contained in IQD? How you create IQD in ReportNet Framework?
IQD Is impromptu query definition, the name it self indicating dat , it contains the SQL statement. To create the iqd in Frame work manager, Create a new query subject with required query items .Set the Externalise method property of that Query subject to 'iqd'.
While the publishing the package select the 'Generate the files for Externalized query subjects'. and publish it to the local machine, which can be used as data source for Transfromer model.
7) What is a loop in Framework manager?
Loop is an very dangerous exception in framework manager we can resolve the loop create alias table. loop Dispaly wrong results in the reportnet.
A Loop is a Closed Path Circuit.
Avoid loops:using shortcuts.we have ambiguous relationships types:hierarchical relationships,recursive relationships,multi-valid relationships.to avoid these relationships using shortcuts.
8) How to create cubes in transformer ?
9) How to create users and permissions in cognos?
Users and Permissions can be given in Access manager - Administration.
Individual users can be created using their names or their Ids (if any) in Access manager and then be given permissions.
This tool is loaded when you install Cognos 7.x in your machine.
In content manager--we have one component called cognos process manager.using process manager we can integrate with third party tools like LDAP or NTLM.we can not create users in reportnet directly.in real time we can use LDAP.
10) What s Cognos Visualizer and Cognos Scripting?

Cognos Visualizer is a tool for creating charts(bar, pie, histogram......) & maps using datasources(datafiles like mdc,iqd,csv,excel etc).

Cognos scripting is like a language, with this we will create macros, Macro is a set of instructions to run a report