Portable documents: Reusing documents across projects

A portable document contains all the design of the document without the data, allowing you to copy documents between projects, even when the projects do not have the same metadata. When you import the document into the replacement project, you map the document to the new project (referred to as reconciling the document).

A Report Services (RS) dashboard (a type of document optimized for viewing online and for user interactivity) can also be made portable; for simplicity, the term document is used throughout this section to refer to documents and RS dashboards.

Portable documents separate document definition from the datasets that provide the data, allowing:

• Documents to be reused across projects, creating a library of reusable documents.

• The document designer and the data architect to work simultaneously, rather than sequentially. That is, the document designer can work on polishing the design of a document (the layouts, panel stacks, and other non-data objects) at the same time that the data architect is preparing the data (the metrics, reports, and other MicroStrategy objects) that will populate the document. When both are finished, the document is reconciled with the datasets.

• Out-of-the-box documents can be deployed to your project by reconciling the documents' content to your own project objects. For example, you can use a document from the MicroStrategy Tutorial project or the Human Resources Analytical Module in your own project.

Use the Document Editor to create the document to be reused across projects. For instructions to create a document, see Creating documents.