All posts by Sorin Suciu

About Sorin Suciu

Sorin is a MicroStrategy specialist, experienced in Retail, Telecom and Customer Operations. Blogging is where his passion for writing met his geek nature and decided they should do some crazy things together. Though not a funny guy himself, he is obsessed with arguably funny stuff, such as Terry Pratchett, Monty Python, Douglas Adams and live parrots.

Report Data Options in version 9

MicroStrategy 9,

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.

Field Report

MicroStrategy 9,

Last week I’ve attended a Free BI Class organized by MicroStrategy in Toronto, to see what’s new.

The presentation was really well planned – a mix of the usual sales pitch and a nice hands on web and desktop exercises.
Some new (at least to me) things that they’ve been working on are a great looking app for iPhone and some new geographic widgets, so heads up BigDataLabs. The app comes as no surprise, now that Apple no longer supports Flash. It takes advantage of the iPhone controls, including the G-sensor.

As a side note, there was a SAS training on the same floor as the Free BI Class, and the participants seemed to have a lot of fun in there, judging by their laughter. Our MSTR sales guy came with an awesome explanation – “Probably someone said it can be deployed in three months” :)

Trick to sort on attributes inside Object Prompt

Engine, Prompt,

This is an old trick concerning sorting in reports and templates.
Let’s say your report uses an object prompt containing a number of attributes and you want the results to be ordered by those attributes. If you simply go to the ‘Advanced Sorting’ menu you will see that the attributes are not there, obviously because they are not part of the report itself.

Here comes the trick. Just add the attributes to the report, define the sorting and then remove them. Go again into the ‘Advanced Sorting’ menu and you will see that they are still there. Neat!

So now, when you execute the report and select your attributes from the object prompt in any combination, the Analytical Engine will know how to deal with them. Even if you play with the position of the attributes (rows, columns or page-by) the sorting options will be maintained.

Looking for opportunities in Toronto

Personal

April 12, 2010: I’m looking no more :)

I have recently gained the Permanent Resident status for Canada and I will be moving in Toronto next month. Hurray!!! :) :) :)

So if you are one of our frequent readers from GTA and you just happen to know a place well suited for an experienced and innovative MicroStrategy developer, please contact me at ssorin@gmail.com or check out my full profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/sorinsuciu.

Sorin Suciu