Use Best Practices Fundamentals

The following best practices save time, money, and greatly maximize ease of future upgrades. Review this best practices topic for ideas on how to:

Minimizing the impact of upgrades
Editing files and apply customization changes
Working with MessageBundle and Localization Descriptor files

Minimizing the impact of upgrades:

Customizing MicroStrategy Web products can involve modifying the configuration files and JSP or ASP.NET files that are shipped with MicroStrategy Web. Subsequent upgrades can overwrite these files, and all customization changes will be lost.

To minimize the impact of upgrades and to avoid losing your customizations, follow these practices before changing any files (configuration, JSP or ASP.NET, images and so on):

Use the Web Customization Editor provided by MicroStrategy SDK for all your customization needs. This editor creates customization plug-ins that reduce the need for maintenance and facilitates easy upgrades. Read the advantages of the Web Customization Editor.
Do not modify the page template to create new page sections. Reusing existing page sections to add or modify content rather than creating new page sections. For example, if you want to add content to the footer of a MicroStrategy Web page, reuse the page section called footer used by that page or the default page rather than create a new page section called footer2.
When upgrading, check whether there are newly deprecated API entities that you have used in your customizations to older MicroStrategy versions. See Before you upgrade for information on deprecated APIs.
Transforms should be used only for rendering data. All logic-related changes should be done using add-ons and events. See Deciding Between Using Custom Add-ons and Custom Events.
It is recommended that you create or duplicate new pages by inheriting from existing pages rather than making copies of existing pages. The Web Customization Editor allows you to create new pages by inheriting from existing MicroStrategy Web pages. See Page Inheritance for additional information.
Do not modify out-of-the-box files JavaScript files. If you wish to add custom JavaScript methods, make sure that these custom files are placed together in a common but separate customization folder and referenced from the "links” page section of the page in which you wish to use them.

Unlike Java classes, JavaScript methods are not backwards compatible. Any customizations performed on out-of-the-box JavaScript files have to be manually re-applied after upgrading your custom Web application.

Editing files and applying customization changes:

When applying customization changes, use the best method to reload the files or restart the application or the server.

Working with MessageBundle and Localization Descriptor files:

The following best practices apply to working with the MessagesBundle or Localization Descriptor files:

When you create new IDs for strings, it is a good practice to use your own prefix instead of mstrWeb in the MessagesBundle files (for example, scenario1.1="My New String", scenario1.2="My Second New String").
If you change the default strings in the Messages Bundles files, keep a log of all the changes to help you with future product upgrades.
When you add new strings to the Messages Bundles files, add them to Messages Bundles files for all the languages to maintain consistency.

See Using Localization Descriptor Files for additional information.