Microstrategy Blog

I’m sure any MicroStrategy consultant who has worked on this kind of stuff before has dealt with…things change. In this case, I started working on the dashboard for my client, and it was going well, I had a basic graph that presented the inventory and sellthrough yada, yada, yada….but, what followed was a barrage of requests not for the dashboard, but new data points. Adding previously uncaptured extracts from the web and other systems so that MicroStrategy could normalize it all in one place and they could see MORE MORE MOREEEEE!!! There’s only two of us right now…and the other guy is a PERL guru…

It’s funny, when I started Orange Box I really thought that most of the business would be in the actual MicroStrategy development…I was wrong. Data points, web scraping for prices, feedback, randomness, then compiling, subdividing and filtering, all with the intent of eventually getting it into a report, we just haven’t reached the intent part yet. Know wat I mean folks? The taste of the dashboard made them data addicts. This is how heroin started…take note.

As promised earlier this year, Senthil Raj – author of the celebrated Object Tracking Tool, has kindly agreed to merge his application with Metadata Browser.

After much coding and testing, time has come to unveil this brand new application, which you will surely find very useful. Click here to download it.

You can also download the manual here.

So, what’s new?

• Well, there’s obviously the new and more powerful than ever Object Tracker. You can use it both to extract a simple list of objects in your project, and to generate documentation such as format, alias, formula, dimensionality, transformation and condition for metrics; lookup table, forms, child & parent relationships for attributes, etc. It behaves more or less like the Project Documentation Wizard from Desktop, with the huge difference that you can actually run all sorts of analysis on the Excel files generated by Metadata Browser, and you simply can’t do it with the HTML files generated by Desktop.
• Another upgrade that you requested is the LDAP and NT authentication modes. They are now available at login.
• Talking about the connection window, Metadata Browser is now capable of reading the most recent username that you have used for a certain project, from the registry. This will make it easier for you to login.

Enjoy!

You know how, after you execute a report, every time you make a change to the Report Data Options the report gets re-executed in order to apply those changes?

Well, in version 9 (not sure about 9.01 yet) this doesn’t happen for the Metric Join Type and Attribute Join Type options. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature, though the behaviour appears to be intended by the developers. If someone from MicroStrategy is reading this, please provide some background details.

The downside of this is, of course, that if you are debugging a report by modifying one of those options, you might get the idea that your change had no effect whatsoever. This is because you were used with automatic re-execution after you pressed OK, as in the previous versions.

I’ve created a forum. It’s not substitute for the MicroStrategy Forum, but since I don’t hang out there, and I do hang out here, if anyone has any questions, or is looking for something feedback a little more critical (and humorous if I dare say), then please post here and I’ll respond to as many questions as I can.

Since this dashboard is going to be built around the the ability to select different products, a panel is going to be necessary. When you select the dashboard template that you’re going to be using, the left hand menu is going to have a several options. We’re going to focus on the second option called “Data Structure” right now (the first one being data sets). The “Data Structure” will show the layered flow of your Dashboard as you progress.

MicroStrategy utilizes the right click…a lot. I like this option, though people have complained about the softwares dependence on the interface. All of the menus that are on the right can be right clicked, at which point you see the different options that are available for the specific object that you’ve picked.

In the image below, we’ve selected the properties for the base layer.

I’m going to make a simple gradient background, white to blue, top to bottom. Select the “properties and formatting” option, and under “colors and lines” select gradient. The rest of the walk through is relatively simple to perform, but play around with the color pallete until you find what pleases you, or your client. For me, this is just a back layer, that’s eventually going to be covered with the panel layer, logos, and selectors.

Next, we’re going to insert the panel itself. Under the “Insert” section of your toolbar/ribbon bar/whatever you call it, you’ll see the option to create a panel (outlined in a blue box). Select this and then, much like a standard paint program, draw the box onto the area that you want. If it’s not perfect, that’s not a problem, the right click will always allow you into the menu to measure out the specifics of the margins and the width.

There are a few formatting options that I prefer with the panel stacks. First, I make sure that name the panel properly. In my opinion there are two ways that you name them, either by item_function or function_item. I prefer the first, so that when you’re browsing the items in a menu, they’re grouped by type first. So, in the case of this panel, I’m going to name it “PANEL_MAIN” descriptive enough. Say this was a title of a report instead, I have a tendency to name it “TITLE_REPORT_REVENUE”, then the report that goes with it “REPORT_REVENUE”. The other option is “REVENUE_REPORT” or “REVENUE_REPORT_TITLE”. The difference comes from how you view them as far as design. When I decide that I want to make a formatting change, related to the font of the titles, I want to make sure I can scroll through them relatively quickly, and as a group…instead of trying to find whether or not I added a title to a specific group. Maybe I’m spending too much time of this, but for ease of element browsing, it makes a big difference for me. Things as simple as horizontal lines that I add are much easier to find if I tag them “LINE_BLAH”. Keep in mind, it’s good practice to name the element as soon as you create it, otherwise it’s easy to lose track of all of the various items, and what their use is.

As a general rule, as you can see in the image above, there’s an option for “Show Title Bar”…I hate the title bar. It’s crappy font, crappy colors, and useless in a panel stack. Remove it. You’ll be cool in my book.