Narrowcast File ITM Personalization - doesn't work

[DBADYN]

I posted a thread earlier about problems I was having with Narrowcast Server 7.5 and the FILE ITM. I am not happy with the response I ended up receiving from MicroStrategy, and wanted to post this to see if the real world can help or relate.

All my client wants to do is use Narrowcast to create an individual PDF report file for each customer account. We have the Report Services document created, and the subscription info is all stored in the data warehouse. The customer id is the attribute on the page-by axis, and it serves as both the subscription id and slicing attribute. I have configured the service to use personalized page execution, and I have followed all (which is not much) instructions available in the documentation and KB. The result: I get a personalized file (i.e. each PDF is named using the customer name) for each customer in the DW, but the content of each PDF contains the report pages for all customers. Essentially, no personalization (slicing) is done, and because of this, the PDF files contain reports for all customers (they are all the same like this).

After logging a support case, MicroStrategy waited almost 2 weeks to tell us that this function will be possible in the NEXT release (after 7.5). My client is outraged, and I am stunned because this seems to be VERY BASIC. We aren't even using email or anything - just files.

I will be requesting more info from MicroStrategy on this, and I will also ask for workarounds that might help my client. IN the meantime, I'd appreciate any advice from anyone out there that has dealt with NC, and personalization using any ITM.

Thanks in advance.

 

[petperson]

You only had to wait 2 weeks for a response?? Not bad

It definately sounds like a something not possible..yet. A workaround you could try is going to defeat the purpose of using personalization though. If you add a prompt to your report on customer id, then Narrowcast will see that prompt inside the RS document and then you can answer the prompt at the user or subscription level. If you have alot of customers to run, of course you will running individual reports. At that point, you can use a control document and rename the file anything you want - insert an information object for the answer to the customer prompt and the file will be renamed with the customer name. There are some examples of the snytax of the control documents on the KB.

If you find another workaround, let us know...

Hope this helps some.

p.p.

 

[VBDemiGod]

If your DB is oracle, you could define connection mappings for each user and tie it together with backend filtering through the FGA Fine Grain Access of Oracle....Hope this helps..

 

[FLB]

Connection mapping is not going to help you as it would not leverage the personalized page-by execution anyway.
(it is better not to use connection mapping to avoid context switching/database logins for every new report that comes in).

We ran into a "similar" limitation with Narrowcast Server 7.1. Except that, at that time, we need to generate PDF Documents using Personalized Page-By execution (PDF was not an option at all at that time). (as mentioned by p.p.)

Question to you: can you tune your database/make schema changes to reduce the execution time of the document and use personalized execution instead? This should be possible as you know exactly what query is going to be executed.

Otherwise, here is how we implemented our PDF/personalized execution solution:
- we built HTML document using PPB reports and content from other internal apps (we need to build a dashboard type of application that could be _printed_).
- MicroStrategy Consulting came and leveraged a PDF conversion module they built somewhere else (using the license-free Apache FOP PDF-conversion thingy)
- we changed the XSLs/HTML documents to include some formatting instructions.
- we used a slightly customized HTML DFM that will recognize the documents to be converted (and call the MicroStrategy component) and rename them as we wanted them.

Currently, we send out those PDF documents in emails as well as serve them through the subscription portal. Of course, now users want more and we will re-use the current implementation for other messages.

If you don't want to pay for MicroStrategy Consulting, check out the sample code (PDF DFM or something like that) which uses a commercial PDF component (from a german company I think; not sure how much the component costs), you can re-build the solution yourself. [here we prefer to pay for consultants than from software maintenance! ;-)]

In our case, post-7.5 is still not going to help us as this will only work for MicroStrategy Report Services Documents (in our case, we bring in non-MicroStrategy personalized content to our message/PDF files....).

What we discovered is that the required CPU and memory to generate PDF document is much higher than for HTML documents.... We added a dual-cpu machine to our NCS system just to offset the additional load.

It's been working fine since then!
We have migrated from 7.1.2 -> 7.1.6 -> 7.2.2 -> 7.2.4 successfully.
We just started testing 7.5.2 and so far, things to hold up pretty well (limited testing at this point).

HTH!
Flb.

 

[talenx]

DBADYN,
I ran into the same issue, turns out according to MSTR slicing on a PDF won't be available until 8.0.0
THT
TalenX

 

[nlim]

All, version 8 is out on the download site. And yes, they did fix this Report Services document personalization issue.

Now you don't need to use personalized report execution.