Best Practices for Customizing MicroStrategy Web

These best practices are designed to get you started in the right place, give you a general overview of how to proceed, and save you time and money by helping you avoid the top 3 mistakes. Adhering to these best practices will help you set up your customization environment optimally.

Before you begin customizing, take time to:  

• Understand the Architecture: Spending time up front will reap significant time dividends later.  

• Use the Documentation: Take a moment to learn about the invaluable detailed and reference content available to you.  

Look through the best practices topics below for the types of customizations you want to make. The following list describes the most common ways you might customize MicroStrategy Web. The links take you to best practices for each customization method:  

• Customize Page Layout or Definition: Use the Page Configuration file for the quickest approach to determining what content appears in your Web pages.  

• Customize Content and Content Layout: Use the HTML template and the Page Configuration file to determine where content is displayed.  

• Simplify Code using Custom HTML Tags: Use MicroStrategy custom HTML tags to simplify and minimize the amount of code you need to place directly in the JSP/ASP files.  

• Modify or Add Functionality: Use events and event handlers to easily build new functionality or to modify default functionality.  

• Alter Workflow or User Actions: Use add-ons to add custom logic that affects a given page more broadly, as opposed to a single action on the page.  

• Modify How Data is Rendered Using Transforms: Use transforms to make the easiest modifications to how data is returned. If your modifications require you to write code, use custom HTML tags to minimize the amount of code you need to place directly in the JSP/ASP files.  

• Integrate with an External Security Source: Know when and how to use the External Security Module, to make use of your existing security or authentication framework.  

• Best Practices for Customizing Prompts: Tips for achieving efficient customizations and reducing upgrade issues.  

After your customizations are made, there are other important best practices to be aware of to simplify the amount of work you need to do to easily test and maintain your customizations, now and when upgrading to future releases. These topics include:

• Best practices for applying customization changes: There are several ways you can view your custom changes; find out which method suits you best. Also, when you are ready to apply your changes, customized configuration files must be reloaded. Understand these details.  

• Best practices for minimizing the impact of upgrades: Upgrades automatically overwrite configuration files, as well as JSP and ASP files. Any customization changes to these files will be lost during an upgrade unless you follow these best practices.