MicroStrategy ONE

Applying Customization Changes

Customizing MicroStrategy Web products can involve modifying configuration files and other files shipped with MicroStrategy Web. To apply the changes, these configuration files must be reloaded. There are several ways to apply your customization changes to the application and view them in a Web browser:

Restart the Web application or the application server

Customizing the Web application can involve modifying the configuration files shipped with MicroStrategy Web. Examples include editing the Page Configuration file or the Style Catalog Configuration file. The configuration files are read by the servlet or ASP.NET file when it initializes itself the first time, and are then stored in memory. This allows you to work on the customization tasks that update the configuration files while other users are accessing the Web application. The customization changes made are not reflected for these users since the servlet or ASP.NET file uses the configuration files stored in memory.

If your customization involves modifying files such as Messages Bundles in the WEB-INF/classes folder, or modifying or re-compiling a class file or JAR, you must restart the Web application or the application server for the changes to take effect. To do this, save the changes from the development tools, and then restart the Web application or the application server.

For details on restarting the application server, see your application server documentation.

If your customization involves changes to JSP or ASP .NET files and the configuration files are not modified (for example, modifying text sections, adding images, and so on), you do not need to restart the Web application.

Reload the configuration files without restarting the Web application or the application server

In a development environment, you can avoid restarting the Web application as described above, by setting the value of the reloadConfigurationFiles parameter to true using the Web Customization Editor. By default, this value is set to false which causes the configuration files to be loaded when the servlet or ASP .NET file initializes the first time. Setting this value to true instructs the application server to check whether the configuration files have been modified since the last request.

Never set the value of the reloadConfigurationFiles parameter to true in a production environment.

MicroStrategy SDK provides a Web Customization Editor that can be used to create a customization plug-in for this purpose. The following steps guide you in creating the plug-in and deploying it. 

  1. Launch the Web Customization Editor. 

  2. Click on MicroStrategy Web Configuration inside the Application Settings view to expand the hierarchical tree. The expanded list comprises the different settings that can be modified to perform customizations. 

  3. Click Web Configuration Settings. 

  4. Double-click MicroStrategy Configuration Settings to launch the Global Settings editor. 

  5. Select the check box for Reload Configuration Files. This sets the value of the reloadConfigurationFiles parameter to true. 

  6. Save your changes. 

  7. Restart the Web server. 

The value for the reloadConfigurationFiles parameter controls reloading of the following files only: the Page Configuration file, the Style Catalog Configuration file, and locales.xml.

If you wish to apply this change to all your customizations, it is recommended that you create a new customization plug-in with just the change described above. So long as you do not delete this customization plug-in from the plugins folder, the value of the reloadConfigurationFiles parameter will be applied as true for all your customizations.