Analyzing Your Requirements for Data as a Service

When you are embedding MicroStrategy BI data in an application, it is important to consider a number of issues. The following list is designed to help you address the most important issues. You can use this list, either as a general guideline or as a checklist, to ensure that you consider all the important issues that affect your data integration effort.

When MicroStrategy BI data is retrieved, do you want logon, data retrieval, and logoff to happen automatically as part of one service?

When MicroStrategy BI data is retrieved, do you want logon, data retrieval, and logoff to be separate service requests? In this case, you would logon and create a session and reuse that for subsequent requests.
How do you want the data to be formatted? For example, do you want the data in XML format, HTML format, or some other custom format?
Do you want all the data to be sent at one time, or do you want to get data incrementally from MicroStrategy?
What kind of data manipulations would you like to support?
What protocol do you want to use to retrieve the data? For example, do you want to connect through HTTP or Web Services?
Which input parameters would you like to send? Which you would like to be kept as default parameters?
What content do you want to retrieve from MicroStrategy? For example, do you want to retrieve report data, document data, history list data, folder data, or some other data?
When requesting data, would you send the report ID or would you want to search for the report based on some keywords?