Creating user hierarchies

With Architect you can create hierarchies as part of your initial project design effort as well as throughout the entire life cycle of a project.

This section discusses creating user hierarchies to support browsing and drilling on an attribute. The system hierarchy is created according to the relationships defined between the attributes in your project. It is automatically created based on the attribute relationships you define, as described in Defining attribute relationships.

The following procedure describes how to create a user hierarchy using Architect.

Prerequisites

The procedure below assumes you have already created a project object and added tables to the project. For information on creating a project using Architect, see Creating projects using Architect.

To create a user hierarchy using Architect

In MicroStrategy Developer, log in to a project.
From the Schema menu, select Architect.
If a message is displayed asking if you want to open Architect in read only mode or edit mode, select Edit and click OK to open Architect in edit mode so that you can make changes to the project. MicroStrategy Architect opens.

If you are only given the option of opening Architect in read only mode, this means another user is modifying the project's schema. You cannot open Architect in edit mode until the other user is finished with their changes and the schema is unlocked.

For information on how you can use read only mode and edit mode for various schema editors, see Using read only or edit mode for schema editors.
From the Hierarchy View, select an attribute to include in the hierarchy, and then click the New Hierarchy toolbar option. A dialog box to name the hierarchy opens.
In the Please enter the hierarchy name field, type a name for the hierarchy and click OK. You are returned to Hierarchy View with the attribute you selected included in the hierarchy.
To add additional attributes to the hierarchy, right-click within the Hierarchy View and select Add/Remove Attributes to Hierarchy. The Select Objects dialog box opens.
In the Available objects pane, select the attributes to use in the hierarchy and click the arrow to add them to the Selected objects pane.
Click OK to close the Select Attributes dialog box and return to Architect. The attributes you selected appear in Hierarchy View.
To create a browsing or drilling relationship, locate an attribute that is to be able to browse to and/or drill to another attribute. Drag from the middle of the attribute to another attribute. A browsing and/or drilling relationship is created between the two attributes.
To use the hierarchy as a drill hierarchy, right-click within the Hierarchy View and select Use As a drill hierarchy. If you clear this check box, the hierarchy is only used for browsing.

A drill hierarchy can be used for browsing as well as drilling. Drill hierarchies are discussed in Hierarchy browsing.
Each attribute in a user hierarchy has properties that affect how that attribute is displayed and accessed in a hierarchy. You can right-click an attribute and configure the properties listed below:
- Define Browse Attributes: Defines the attributes to which users can browse to and/or drill to from the selected attribute. These relationships can also be defined by dragging and dropping from one attribute to another as is described earlier in this procedure.
- Define Attribute Filters: Specifies whether the data retrieved and displayed when browsing the hierarchy should be complete or filtered by any specific criteria. Only data satisfying the filter criteria is displayed when browsing the hierarchy (see Filtering attributes in a hierarchy).
- Set As Entry Point: Specifies whether the user can begin browsing in this hierarchy using this attribute (see Entry point).
- Element Display: Determines the elements a user can see. The element display may be Locked, Unlocked, or Limited (see Controlling the display of attribute elements).
From the Home tab, click Save and Close to save your changes and close Architect.
You can save user hierarchies in any folder. However, to make the user hierarchy available for element browsing in the Data Explorer, you must place it in the Data Explorer sub-folder within the Hierarchies folder. This is discussed in Hierarchy browsing.
From the Schema menu, select Update Schema.