The Motio Application Development Framework (MotioADF) is targeted at Cognos customers who want to extend, customize or embed the Cognos 8 or ReportNet line of products. Developed by the Cognos SDK Experts at Motio Technologies, the MotioADF enables companies to bring tailored Cognos BI solutions to market faster and more reliably than when using the raw Cognos SDK.

The MotioADF is provided as a layered "stack"

The toolkit layer provides a powerful, object-oriented interface on top of the standard Cognos SDK. Operations such as report generation, report execution, content store management and metadata manipulation can be greatly simplified using the toolkit layer. Clients of the toolkit are also insulated from Cognos SDK interface changes between Cognos versions.

The MotioADF services layer implements a series of services which provide value added features on top of the default Cognos capabilities. Examples include asynchronous report execution, report output management (and archiving), extensible delivery services, etc. The service layer also defines a persistent domain model which expands upon many of the core concepts defined in Cognos.

The MotioADF webtier is a series of abstractions and building blocks which make it much easier to build custom web applications in front of Cognos based installations. The web layer includes a powerful set of re-usable AJAX enabled widgets which expose Cognos capabilities and are easy to plug into custom web applications. Examples include query item value pickers, file and folder pickers, a package explorer, etc. The MotioADF webtier also includes a powerful custom prompting framework which enables customers to easily build advanced custom prompts which can be shared across many reports. Several web based wizards are provided which enable the creation of adhoc reports, schedules, profiles, etc.

The MotioADF ships with a feature rich Custom Portal that acts as an end user focused replacement for Cognos Connection. This Custom Portal is a fully functional web application that demonstrates just how easy it can be to a create robust and front end for Cognos using the MotioADF. Many of the ADF's features are exposed via this web application and it provides a solid foundation for customization and extension. The Custom Portal is also bundled with sophisticated ant based build and installation scripts which make it easy to rebuild and deploy. The Custom Portal gives customers a huge "head start" on building a custom user experience for Cognos.