Architect versus Project Creation Assistant

MicroStrategy has two tools that each provide unique ways to create a project: the Project Creation Assistant and Architect.

The Project Creation Assistant provides a linear, wizard-style workflow to create a project. This helps to guide you through the various steps required in project creation in a logical order. In general, the Project Creation Assistant provides separate steps to add and define the objects required for a project.

While you can add and define multiple tables, facts, and attributes for your project, each is provided as a separate step in the step-by-step creation of your project.

Also, Project Creation Assistant is intended to be used for the initial creation of your project, and thus cannot be used to modify an existing project. Once a project has been created, you must use Architect or the individual schema editors and wizards to modify the project.

Architect provides a centralized interface which allows you to define all the required components of your project and perform the various tasks to create a project.

When creating projects using Architect, including at least some tables in your project is a first step to include some information in your project. With Architect, once tables are added to your project you have much more flexibility in the order in which you create your project. While you are creating your project in Architect, you can easily switch between adding tables, creating facts, creating attributes, defining relationships between attributes, creating user hierarchies, and any other required project creation tasks. While performing these tasks, Architect provides a visual representation of your project, which helps to provide an intuitive workflow.

Both tools provide options to automatically create facts and attributes based on the columns and data available in your data source. Automatic fact and attribute creation can save a substantial amount of time in the creation of a project.

As summarized above, Project Creation Assistant and Architect provide two unique workflows to support the creation of a project. To help determine which tool you should use to create your project, the table below compares these two tools:

Project Creation Task or Feature	Project Creation Assistant	Architect
The workflow of creating a project	Provides a linear, wizard-style workflow to add tables, attributes, and facts to a project	Provides a flexible workflow to add objects to a project in an order that suits your requirements from within a centralized interface
Can be used to modify a project	Can only be used for the initial creation of a project	Can be used to both create a project and make modifications at any time in a project's life cycle
Can create user hierarchies	User hierarchies cannot be created	User hierarchies can be created
Automatic creation of facts and attributes	Can automatically create facts and attributes based on rules	Can automatically create facts and attributes based on rules
Can create initial project object	The initial project object can be created	You must first create the initial project object using the Project Creation Assistant before using Architect