This is one of the requirement that I had sized quite some time back, and luckily I got go-ahead to implement it. My current client has process under which each projects goes, need less to say, time consuming. When business user say that they want drilling to be standardized, I feel a bit awkward. Most of the business users from my current clients have been trained by MicroStrategy, Inc. itself. First, these guys must know the difference between drilling and hyperlinking. Drilling is a feature of MicroStrategy, which comes OOB where as hyperlinking is something done by MicroStrategy developer, by actual link option for text fields (Similar to VB that we have been seeing for long) or using attributes having form of type html.

Now here is the requirement. Ex-vendor ripped the client big time by doing clumsy work. Thanks to them. They had created some enterprise dashboards that were having serialized hyperlinking. These hyperlinking were dependent on the name of project as well as the I-Server IP address. They just changed the name of MicroStrategy project and every URL went for toss. Now imagine, IP address/machine name of I-Server machine changing. This exercise would be repeated. I ran through 7-8 months old email regarding the same and found some leads, but were not working. Don’t know why, I myself had provided the solution to my peer. There are no (single) tech notes that would help me finding a solution, but I could find a solution by combining 2 tech notes, so relaxed.

Here is problem: Currently client has url SDK implemented as

http://abc.xyz.com/WebServer/servlet/mstrWeb?Project=<Project_Name>&Server=<IServer>&port=0&evt=4001&src=mstrWeb.report.4001&reportID=<Report_ID>&reportViewMode=1&src=mstrWeb

I can’t give exact example due to confidentiality but example above is very similar to actual, except that real one is about executing a document where as above one is about a report. Now, client want to remove the dependent on IP Address (We are providing removing the dependence as extra free addon, or may be we should generate more profit in future as that standardization is not part of the current scope of work) . Current URL is more complex and has two more not required events and corresponding arguments.

Now if tomorrow, any change of IP/machine name would make the work useless. The solution is simple. Simply remove the reference to them. The real magic of URL SDK lies in event and argument. You can read the function PDF that comes with installation of MicroStrategy. It talks about 4-5 event. A glimpse: You can create a link that will execute the report with particular attributes in page-by axis or Run reports/document with prompt answers.

In case of jumping from one prompted document to another, you need to pass messageID parameter that would forward the prompt to next document.

Only drawback of using URL SDK: Not a drawback, I would not recommend doing it. Using URL SDK you can also pass the login/apssword and create a hyperlinks that would work from a complete non-MicroStrategy page. Remember, I’m talking about the hyperlink not the resultant of hyperlinking. This puts your system in some disadvantageous situation.