Cognos Insight not launching from TM1 Application

[foogy]

Dear TM1 experts,

may be one of you already got stuck in the following situation and found a way to solve that. In this scenario, we use TM1 10.2.0 FP2 and Internet Explorer 10.

We intend to use Cognos Insight (Connected mode) as frontend for a TM1 Application (instead of or as alternative to the TM1 Application Web frontend). The user has Cognos Insight installed locally on his computer for all users (i.e. not installed into his user profile). It has happended now twice that Insight will not launch from the TM1 Application's approval hierarchy, but instead Insight is provided for download (although already installed). It seems that TM1 does not recognize the installation of Insight for whatever reason. We have checked that Insight has really been installed into "C:\Program Files\..." by passing the appropiate command line option for the MSI installer.

In the screenshots below, you can see the way how Insight is launched from the Application's approval hierarchy. If successful, Insight launches without any further message or request.

TM1 Insight launched from context menu in approval hierarchy

17-02-2015 19-16-46.png (16.74 KiB) Viewed 2958 times

But in our two cases, instead of launching Insight, we receive the same message as if Insight was not intalled at all, which leads me to the conclusion that Insight is not recognized:

Insight not detected although installed

17-02-2015 19-33-45.png (9.54 KiB) Viewed 2958 times

Do you perhaps know how a installation of Insight is detected by the TM1 Application framework? There must be some component causing the wrong assumption that Insight is not available on the computer, and thus it is provided for installation again instead of just launching the tool.

The only source of information so far found on IBM is the following:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.w ... wg21596247
It is related to some IE settings that might prevent Insight from being launched although installed. However, all of our clients are set up identically, so this doesn't make sense. And it also refers to launching Insight from Cognos Connection instead of TM1 Application, so I guess this IBM note is not applicable for our situation.

If you have any idea or you solved this or a similar issue before, please share your knowledge.

Kind regards,
foogy

[foogy]

Do you perhaps know how a installation of Insight is detected by the TM1 Application framework? There must be some component causing the wrong assumption that Insight is not available on the computer, and thus it is provided for installation again instead of just launching the tool.

At least for this question, I found the IBM approach during a longer debugging session of the TM1 Application's JavaScript code. See screenshot below, the green colored inline documentation gives a summary of how TM1 Application framework tries to detect the presence of Cognos Insight, depending on Browser and Version. Basically, for IE10 it tries to open the .cogrcp_insight file inside a hidden IFRAME and evaluates how the content of this file is being parsed by IE (as plain text or not at all - which means that IE knew how to handle that file, so it assumes that Insight is in place).

17-02-2015 20-12-38.png (45.57 KiB) Viewed 2941 times

Finally I was able to launch Insight by playing around with the Browser Mode in IE Developer Tools (F12 key). But still this is not a solution yet, because initially, the Browser mode says "IE10 Compatiblity Mode" and it does not launch Insight. When switching to any other mode and then coming back to IE10 Compatibility Mode again, then Insight launches. That's strange.

So it obviously has to do something with Internet Explorers "feature" of compatibility modes. The inline documentation in the screenshot also includes a note on that.

So there are two approaches and I do not like any of them:

1.) Find out what has to be changed in IE settings, group policies or whatever in order to get Insight launched right from the beginning. Changing such settings in a standardized IT environment is not an easy task (not technically, of course).
2.) Adapt the JavaScript code to something that skips the detection procedure of Insight and assume that the user got Insight installed. If he did not, the .cogrcp_insight file will be downloaded and nothing happens. So in this case, the action is also clear, namely install Cognos Insight.

I guess I will try out approach 2 as a medium-term workaround. May be it is worth the check the 10.2.2 version of TM1 and check whether the method of detecting the presence of Insight has been improved here. However, updating to 10.2.2 is not an option at the moment.

So I hope this forum-like documentation is helpful for others that might be confronted with a similar situation.

foogy