Best Practices for Customizing Prompts

The following practices ensure that your prompt customizations are performed in an efficient manner and reduce the overhead when upgrading MicroStrategy Web.

Be familiar with the Block Infrastructure and Prompt Architecture so you understand which components need to be customized to achieve your customization.
Use the Block Finder to analyze the properties associated with the block. The Block Finder is an easy-to-use, intuitive tool that locates blocks used for rendering prompts and displays their block properties.
Do not modify out-of-the-box blocks. To create a custom block, inherit from an existing block in the Block Library and modify its block properties.
Block properties should be modified using server-side Layout definition files.
Location of custom client-side layout definition files should be specified in a block by using the following syntax: @pluginName:[path to the client-side layout definition file]. For example, @MyPlugin: mstr.layouts.listBrowser syntax gets resolved on the client-side as plugins/MyPlugin/WEB-INF/xml/layoutsCS/mstr/layouts/listBrowser folder.
Global customizations for the Prompt page (that do not require information from individual prompt or involve individual prompts) should be performed on the PromptEditor (view block) and ReportInstanceModel (model block).
Customizations for individual prompt should be performed on the blocks used for rendering that specific prompt; not on the PromptEditor (view block) and ReportInstanceModel (model block). See View Blocks for Different Types of Prompts for information on blocks used for rendering different prompt styles.