Following from the previous recipe, we are now creating a configuration file with the connection settings that we can later distribute to our mobile users.
Configuration files are different depending on the device you are using; so there's one for iPad, one for iPhone, Android, and so on. The vast majority of the steps are similar from platform to platform; please refer to the product documentation MicroStrategy Mobile Design and Administration Guide for specific or nonstandard settings.
Mobile configuration can be done in two ways: automatically with a configuration file (like in this recipe) or manually on the mobile device itself. The advantage of the former method is that you can re-use the file for as many clients as you want.
Mobile devices communicate with the Mobile Server through HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) much like an Internet browser does, therefore it is vital that they are connected to the network somehow, by means of Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, or the like. It is not necessary to know the IP address of the iPad (in this case), as long as the device is able to communicate with the web server via HTTP.
You can try the connection by opening the Opera browser and typing the IP address of the web server (192.168.1.89) into the address bar. You should see an image logo of IIS.
From the Administrator Page inside Internet Explorer:
- Click on Mobile Configuration on the top-right of the screen.
- After a while, when the Mobile Configuration Page appears, click on the blue hyperlink labeled Define New Configuration, see screen capture:
- From the Device combobox, select iPad and click on OK.
- Change the Configuration name value to
iPad_COOKBOOK, and leave all the rest of options unchanged on this tab. - Click on the Connectivity Settings tab. The first combobox, Authentication mode, must be set to Windows (as we are using IIS, this is how we validate on the web server).
- In the following Login and Password textboxes, put the operating system credentials that you use to open a session in Windows server and check the option Overwrite user-specified credentials when applying configuration.
- Now click on the blue hyperlink named Configure New Mobile Server.
- In Mobile Server name field, type the machine hostname you've given in step 3 of the previous recipe (in my case is
WIN-5KHTNPRO62T). - Check the option box Mobile clients access this server using the following external name: this enables the next text field. Type here the IP address of your Windows server (
192.168.1.89in my case). - Leave the rest of parameters as they are and scroll down to the Default Project Authentication: header.
- Notice that Authentication mode is set to Standard, which is ok; this is how we validate against the Intelligence Server.
- In the next field Login type
Administratorand in Password type the one that you've been using to open MicroStrategy Desktop. - Check Overwrite user-specified credentials when applying configuration.
- Now click on the blue hyperlink Configure New Project.
- Since we only have one, the COOKBOOK project should be already set in the Project Name combobox and the checkbox Use default authentication selected.
- We're done with this tab, so we scroll back up to click on the Home Screen tab.
- Set the radio button Display the contents of a folder and click on the small down arrow button to open a credentials dialog:
- Again, this is the MicroStrategy username, so type
Administratorand the corresponding password. - Click on the Login button to display another panel. Open the first combobox where it says Shared Reports and select My Reports. Then click on the Current Folder button.
- Now hit the Save button. The configuration is stored and we can see the iPad_COOKBOOK line in the list.
- There are four icons on the right: click on the one that looks like a globe (tool tip: Generate URL).
- Here, in the first textbox change localhost to the IP address of the server (
192.168.1.89in my case). - Open Authentication mode and select Windows, and then click on Save.
- Click again on the globe button to bring up the Generate Configuration URL dialog, this time click on Generate URL, and a text area will appear with a long string representing an address beginning with
mstripad://. - This is the link that you need to open from an iPad to read the configuration file. The easiest way is to select all the content of this text area, copy and paste the entire URL into an e-mail message. Then send the message to yourself.
The client configuration of a mobile device is not trivial. Given that we use a Windows server with IIS, we need to deal with the NT credentials first (step 6) in order to reach the web server, and then with the MicroStrategy username /password (steps 12 and 18), so that we can log in to the project.
In my setup, I used a VMware virtual machine connected to my home router. Since I do not have a DNS service running, I rely on class C private range IPs instead of DNS names. If you're a Net wiz, surely you can do better than this with your local network. I just wanted to keep things simple so that we can focus on BI.
While setting the Mobile Server name (step 8), we used the hostname of the Windows machine, although the option labeled Mobile clients access this server using the following external name (step 9) allows us specify a different name or an IP in case we are behind a NAT service or a load balancer, or simply we cannot rely on a working DNS server.
iPad users may change and store their credentials on the devices (they love to do it…); so the option labeled Overwrite user-specified credentials when applying configuration gives the possibility to overwrite those credentials in order to use only the username and password stored in the configuration file.
Needless to say, your production settings may be different and more complicated than this, involving proxies, different addressing, and so on. Ask your company network engineers when configuring the web server.
The rest of the connection settings are usually good enough for a standard implementation. Refer to the manual and use them with common sense, for example, you may want to increase the memory limit or the network timeout in case you have very large datasets in your reports.