Introspect MicroStrategy report definition with Web SDK

Sometimes it can be useful to introspect MSTR report definitions to make assertions about them for unit tests, or to extract other metadata about their structure.

I wrote some code that illustrates how to open a report definition and check whether a particular attribute is included in the report’s template or not:

final String ATTR = "... MSTR attribute GUID ..."
final String reportId = "... mstr report GUID to look at ..."

WebObjectsFactory wof = WebObjectsFactory.getInstance();
WebIServerSession iSession = wof.getIServerSession();
// set iSession server/port/etc.

System.out.println(iSession.getSessionID());

WebReportSource reptSrc = wof.getReportSource();
reptSrc.setExecutionFlags(EnumDSSXMLExecutionFlags.DssXmlExecutionNoAction);
WebReportInstance inst = reptSrc.getNewInstance(reportId);
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
Enumeration<WebTemplateAttribute> attrs = inst.getTemplate().getTemplateAttributes().elements();
if (!Collections.list(attrs).stream().anyMatch(attr -> attr.getAttributeInfo().getName().equals(ATTR))) {
  System.out.println("Expected attribute missing");
}

iSession.closeSession();

Two tricks here to point out

  • DssXmlExecutionNoAction was necessary to avoid breaking on prompted reports. I wanted to have MSTR pull the report definition like going into design mode, but without attempting to execute the report. Similarly, I didn’t want jobs to clutter up the I-server if I’m trying to crack open dozens of reports to make assertions and move on.

  • It takes a few extra steps to use MSTR list/array-like objects with Java 8+ closures. MSTR collections don’t obey the standard Java collection APIs but you can often get an old-school java.util.Enumeration out of them. From there, you can get to a List and then to a stream. Lots of hoops to jump through, but worth it to avoid writing the same old while (!found) loop yet one more time.

Written on February 15, 2019