Data as a Service

MicroStrategy provides a set of web-accessible services, called tasks in MicroStrategy Web, that allow application developers to access most of the commonly used MicroStrategy functionality as a service. These out-of-the-box services are supported by the Task Infrastructure, which is the mechanism used to implement MicroStrategy's service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The topics in this section of the MSDL provide both conceptual information about using data as a service and practical instructions for how to embed MicroStrategy BI data into an application using MicroStrategy's pre-built services.

• Overview of Data as a Service

  This topic explains how MicroStrategy Web's service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Task Infrastructure support the ability to provide BI data as a service. In this model, MicroStrategy acts as the analytical platform to deliver content to multiple applications, allowing users to retrieve BI data from MicroStrategy and incorporate it into their line of business applications using a variety of interfaces.  

• Analyzing Your Requirements for Data as a Service

  This topic explains how to analyze your requirements for using data as a service so that you can determine which tasks (that is, which of MicroStrategy's web-accessible services) you should use.  

• General Workflow for Data as a Service

  This topic describes the typical workflow for applications that use a MicroStrategy task to retrieve context-specific BI data on the fly, providing step-by-step explanations from the initial user request to the rendering of the HTML output on the browser.

• Specific Workflow for a Common MicroStrategy Task (Service)

  is topic provides an explanation of the workflow and execution of the separate tasks—logon, reportExecute, and logout—that make up the composite reportDataService task. This special composite task is designed expressly to allow applications with embedded BI data to quickly open a session, retrieve data, and close the session.