Using Preferences

There are various levels of Preferences that can be applied and utilized in MicroStrategy Web. There are two types of preferences:

• Metadata-based preferences— Values stored in the project metadata that can be accessed and manipulated using MicroStrategy Developer, MicroStrategy Web, or the MicroStrategy SDK.

• Browser-specific preferences— Values stored as cookies on a specific Web browser that are independent of the user, project, or server on which a project resides.

The implementation of these preferences with regards to their precedence is explained in the Preferences Usage Example section.

Each type of preference is stored differently. Additionally, there are multiple levels of metadata-based preferences. The following tables summarizes the way in which MicroStrategy Web accesses different types of preferences.

	Summary	Tools	Stored In
Metadata-based preferences
User-level Preferences	Preferences that are specific to a particular user.  These can be set by the individual user in the Preferences dialog.	sys_definitions.xml, preferencesGroups.xml	Metadata
Project-level Preferences	Preferences that are the global defaults for a particular project.  All users of this project use these values as defaults for that project. These can be set only by the Administrator in the Preferences dialog.	sys_definitions.xml, preferencesGroups.xml	Metadata and sys_defaults.xml/sys_defaults_ServerName.xml
Server-level Preferences	Preferences that are the global defaults for all the projects on a given Intelligence Server.	sys_defaults.xml, sys_defaults_ServerName.xml	Metadata and sys_defaults.xml/sys_defaults_ServerName.xml
Browser-specific preferences
Browser Preferences	Preferences that are specific to a particular browser.  These values are set to initial defaults and then determined and remembered based on user action in a particular browser.	<browser-settings> node in the page configuration file	Cookies