Customizing Add-ons

You can use add-ons to alter the flow of data through MicroStrategy Web products. Add-ons can alter data flow either before or after MicroStrategy data has been collected from Intelligence Server. (For an introduction to general page flow execution in MicroStrategy Web, see Page Execution and Event Processing in the Understanding MicroStrategy Web section.) Add-ons are essentially containers for custom code that you want the application to execute, either before the collection of MicroStrategy data or after data collection but before delegating WebBean data to the transform for rendering. Because of the highly component-based nature of add-ons, any custom code you add can be upgraded easily in the future.

The default Web application uses add-ons to perform a number of tasks, including setting execution and result flags, and rules for incremental fetch on grids and graphs. These manipulations are accomplished right after restoring the state of the bean and just before collecting the data.

This section provides the following information about add-ons:

• Add-on interface
  Describes the methods that are available for the Add-on interface and the Abstract class, AbstractAppAddon.  
• Add-on creation
  Describes how to develop an add-on. The example used to explain the process is an add-on that supports a single input parameter passed from the Page Configuration file.  
• Add-on execution
  Once an add-on has been created and compiled, you must tell the MicroStrategy Web application when it should use your add-on. This topic describes how to do that.