MicroStrategy Objects

Your MicroStrategy project consists of several different types of objects. The information below explains what purpose each object serves, and describes how you can use the object to better analyze your organization's data.

Providing Business Context to a Report: Attributes

Attributes are the business concepts reflected in your stored business data in your data source, providing a context in which to report on and analyze business facts or calculations. While knowing your company's total sales is useful, knowing where and when the sales took place provides the kind of analytical depth users require on a daily basis.

Calculating Data on a Report: Metrics

Metrics are MicroStrategy objects that represent business measures and key performance indicators. From a practical perspective, metrics are the calculations, similar to formulas in spreadsheet software, performed on data stored in your database, the results of which are displayed on a report.

Filtering Data on a Report: Filters

A filter is the part of a MicroStrategy report that screens data in your data source to determine whether the data should be included in or excluded from the calculations of the report results. Filters are helpful in clarifying large quantities of data and only displaying subsets of that data, so reports show users what they really need to see. For more information, see Introduction to Filters.

Asking for User Input: Prompts

A prompt is a question the system presents to a user during report execution. The answer determines what data is displayed on the report when it is returned from your data source, allowing you to target the report during its initial load. For more information, see About Prompts.

Designing a Report's Structure: Templates

A template is the structure that underlies any report. A template specifies the set of information that the report should retrieve from your data source, and it also determines the structure in which the information is displayed in the report's results. A template's structure is the location of objects on the template, such as showing that metrics have been placed in the report's columns, and attributes have been placed in the rows.

Dashboards

A dashboard is an interactive display that you can use to quickly and easily explore your business data. Visualization dashboards are quick to create and visually striking. They can be used as proofs-of-concept, to provide a quick look at data trends, to provide a framework for users to investigate data and gain insight, etc. They require minimal steps to create and provide rich interactivity in the form of data visualizations.

A dashboard contains objects representing data from one or more datasets, which are sets of data that can be displayed on a dashboard or a document. A dataset can be a MicroStrategy report, a MicroStrategy Intelligent Cube, or data imported directly from an external data source.

Documents

A MicroStrategy Report Services document displays your organization's data in a format that is similar to a PowerPoint presentation, where several grid and graph reports can be viewed at the same time, along with images and text. A broad selection of data visualizations (called widgets) and a wide variety of formatting options, including graph styles, shapes, document headers and footers, and watermarks, allows you to customize and fine-tune the appearance of your documents.

High-quality, Pixel Perfect documents allow you to display your business data in a user-friendly way that is suitable for presentation to management for boardroom-quality material. Examples of documents include scorecards and dashboards, managed metrics documents, production and operational documents, and more. For an overview of documents, see Introduction to Report Services Documents.

A document contains objects representing data from one or more datasets, which are sets of data that can be displayed on a dashboard or document. A dataset can be a MicroStrategy report, a MicroStrategy Intelligent Cube, or data imported directly from an external data source. For an overview and steps to add a dataset to a document, see the Document Creation Help.

Reports

A report is a MicroStrategy object that represents a request for a specific set of formatted data from your data source. In its most basic form it consists of two parts:

• A report template (usually simply called a template), which is the underlying structure of the report.
• The report-related objects placed on the template, such as attributes, metrics, filters, and prompts.

For more information, see Introduction to Reports.