Visual Insight Dashboard - Microstrategy 9.x/9.4.1 (Flash) Vs Microstrategy 10.x/10.1/10.2/10.3 (HTML 5)

In this post, I am writing few important differences between MSTR 941 flash based visual insight dashboard and MSTR 10.2 HTML 5 based visual insight dashboard. 

I am writing this only based on my experience and my understanding. I may be wrong in few cases or few of them may be changed in hot fixes or new versions. 

Starting from version 10, Microstrategy deprecated Flash and introduced HTML 5 based dashboards. this is applicable for both documents and VI based dashboards. 

This is one of the very major and important change in Microstrategy 10. In this post, we are going to see few key characteristic difference because of this change.

1) Rendering :

This is one of the major difference between Flash and HTML 5 based visual insights dashboard. 

In a Flash based VI dashboard, it loads all data and charts in a single shot. When you run a dashboard, it will load everything in your browser in the first run. After that, everything else (moving to different layout, applying filters, moving to panels) is very smooth. No additional process

In HTML 5, It will only load what you see in the first screen. After that, when you move to different layout or panel, it will load at that time. Even in the grid, when you scroll down, it will load again 

2) Caching:

In MSTR 941 Flash based VI dashboard, 

It creates one XML and one Flash based cache file for the entire dashboard. It includes all layout, panels etc

In HTML 5, It creates one HTML 5 cache per layout and panels. In case your dashboards has 5 layouts then it creates 5 HTML 5 cache file. If it is having 5 layouts and 2 panels then it creates 7 HTML 5 cache file

In this case, we can't create all cache by a single cache update subscription. we have to execute each and every layout manually to create cache

3) Property Changes:

Because of the HTML 5 , we are seeing few differences in properties

a) Add & remove  - In MSTR 941 VI grid, we have options to add and remove objects instead of drag and drop from the data set panel

b) Export -  Few important changes here 

• From MSTR 10, No export support to .mht format so no option for offline interactive dashboard except .mstr format for which we need Microstrategy desktop to open

• No option to export the particular piece of graph or grid within that layout. Only option is to export the whole layout. 

• Exporting a big grid from the HTML 5 based dashboard - It will only export the grid data what you are seeing in the screen. It will not export the whole grid

c) External data set 

In HTML 5, when you add external data inside the VI dashboard, by default it will not save the cube automatically instead it will be a server managed cube. 

In this case, we can only publish the cube from the VI dashboard where we used this external cube or data.

But we have option to save this manually. In the VI dashboard, right click the dataset and save it as a dataset

Here in this post, I only highlighted few critical\key elements and differences. 

Apart from this, there are lots of new and awesome features added in Microstrategy 10.x which are really useful and cool. 

Few Examples, 

• Very clean visuals and dashboards
• D3 Visualization plugin - we can add D3 charts easily
• PRIME Cube - Improves the performances for large Cubes
• Lots of formatting options - Very interesting

And many more interesting items.