title: How Do I Create A Global Style for All Cognos 10 Reports?
body: <p>My team has been working with creating dashboards and drill-through reports.  We've moved past our proof-of-concept phase and are now working to build the "production ready" reports.  In our meetings it has been brought up that the overall styles for the reports should be changed from the Cognos defaults.</p>
  
  <p>We became aware of Cognos's skin system.  We saw that there was skinning for the portal and UI elements that are used within the report display and portal.  This is not necessarily what we wanted.  We ideally wanted to be able to change the portal to company branding AND change the way lists and crosstabs looked (as well as other elements of the actual report).</p>
  
  <p>I was able to look at the page source generated for a report and saw that it is including styles from:</p>
  
  <pre><code>cognos\c10_64\webcontent\schemas
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>While poking around the webcontent directory I also found this path:</p>
  
  <pre><code>cognos\c10_64\webcontent\reportstyles
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Both of these paths contain css files with similar names.  The included styles for the report HTML point to the "schemas" directory, however my logical thinking self would like to believe that the "reportstyles" directory is used somewhere within the Cognos report display even though I have not seen it included in any page source I have viewed.</p>
  
  <p>I have begun making my modifications to the css in the "schemas" path using a system of taking the included css file, copying the css out of it and placing it into a "xxx_system.css" file, and then including that file in the original css file.</p>
  
  <p>This process works and we are able to see the changes, but we are still wondering if there is a better or "more correct" way of doing this.  Can anyone elaborate on the best way to skin/style the actual reports?</p>