Types of Beans in MicroStrategy Web

There are two types of beans in MicroStrategy Web, metadata beans and application beans. Both types conform to the programming standards that make them JavaBeans, but each classification of bean has a different MicroStrategy implication, which distinguishes them from each other.

Metadata beans

The role of metadata beans is to contain complete access to all of the data associated with a specified MicroStrategy object. Metadata beans are also called Web beans, as they implement the WebBean interface. All Web beans are transformable (that is, they implement the Transformable interface). Transformable objects generally contain data that can be transformed, or rendered, by transform objects. Different transforms contain different rules for rendering data structures.

Application beans

An application bean is related to accessing some kind of Web application functionality. For example, the sorting of report data is performed in the Sort Editor. The Sort Editor functionality and interface are stored in the SortEditorBean application bean. Many application beans such as GridFormatEditorBean and ObjectBrowserBean are not transformable but are self-rendering and automatically rendered.

Many application beans that are contained by the ReportFrameBean do not work outside the context of this container. To learn about container beans, refer to the Container beans section.