Release notes

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Exporting narratives to PDF

You can now export lengthy narratives to a multi-page PDF document.

To ensure proper functionality, your systems administrator must whitelist Arria for MicroStrategy service URLs on your MicroStrategy server; see the MicroStrategy documentation for details.

The specific service URLs depend on your chosen deployment option:

Arria-Hosted Public Cloud deployments

Arria-Hosted Private Cloud and Customer-Hosted deployments

Rarely, narrative generation exceeds the 60-second timeout limit set by MicroStrategy. If you encounter this issue when exporting narratives to PDF, you can ask your MicroStrategy administrator to increase the timeout limit on the server, as described in the MicroStrategy documentation.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

NLG Apps: Additional license checking

We now check that the narrative creator has a valid Arria for MicroStrategy license each time a narrative is generated in a dashboard or dossier.

If no valid license is found, the following error message is generated instead of a narrative:

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

Security updates

This release includes essential security updates.

New features and enhancements

Fixed issues

Known issues

New features and enhancements

Notable changes

Fixed issues

Known issues

NLG Apps optimizations

Arria for MicroStrategy 3.4.0 introduces several optimizations to the Describe a Bar Chart, Time-Based Variance, Target-Based Variance, and Trend Analysis apps. You now have more control over narrative length, content, and formatting, resulting in narratives that are optimized for your specific reporting requirements and for improved readability.

See NLG Apps optimizations for details.

NLG Apps: Currency values rounding error

At the data analysis level, NLG apps work with the actual values in your data. At the narrative level, however, the apps display large currency values in rounded form. This is done to improve readability, but occasionally it creates the false appearance of a calculation error.

For example, if the March Sales value is $2,666,503 and the April Sales value is $4,821,627.50, an NLG app correctly calculates (from the raw data) a variance value of $2,155,124.50.  If your Sales measure has its Entity Type set to Currency, the app might report this insight as:

This statement appears inaccurate because the difference between $2.7M and $4.8M is $2.1M, not $2.2M. The app has calculated correctly; the reported result appears inaccurate only because rounding was applied to all three values for display purposes AFTER data analysis was complete.

Arria Answers: No suggested queries on MicroStrategy Workstation

Arria Answers does not generate suggested queries when using the Arria custom visualization on MicroStrategy Workstation.

Custom Narratives: Support for additional Parameter Control fields

Previously, Arria for MicroStrategy limited users to a maximum of three Parameter Control fields. This limit no longer applies.

About Arria for MicroStrategy dialog box

You can now access an About dialog box from the Arria for MicroStrategy context menu. The dialog box displays detailed version information, which is valuable when reporting issues to our support team.

Arria Answers: Support for single date fields

Arria Answers can now handle date values stored in a single column, as shown below. Spreading date components (year, quarter, month, and day) across multiple columns is no longer required.

Arria Answers: Two-digit year values

In addition to four-digit year values (e.g. 2022), two-digit year values (e.g. 22) are now supported.

Arria Answers: Support for additional aggregation types

Arria Answers now supports four aggregation types: Sum, Average, Minimum, and Maximum. Previously, it supported Sum aggregation only. This improvement increases your options for querying your data — see Query types for guidance.

Arria Answers: Aliases can now start with the name of another field in the dataset

Arria Answers now correctly handles fields with an alias that starts with the name of another field in the dataset. For example, if your dataset includes both a Date field and a Sales field, you can give the Date field the alias SalesDate.

Arria for MicroStrategy 3.3.0 must be installed before existing Arria visualizations are reconfigured

As part of the Arria for MicroStrategy 3.3.0 update, we have made changes to both the Arria for MicroStrategy custom visualization and the live back-end services it uses.

Due to the back-end changes, trying to reconfigure an existing narrative or Arria Answers visualization before installing Arria for MicroStrategy 3.3.0 results in the visualization freezing.

To resolve this issue, install Arria for MicroStrategy 3.3.0, then close and reopen your dossier.

Arria Answers: Empty cells (null values) in dimension fields result in error messages and no suggested queries

If a non-time dimension field in your dataset — e.g. Country or Product — contains empty cells (null values), Arria Answers returns this error message:

If a time dimension field in your dataset — e.g. Date or Year — contains empty cells (null values), no suggested queries are generated and Arria Answers returns this error message:

To avoid these issues, please ensure that your dimension fields contain no empty cells.

NLG Apps: Reordering measures in Correlations App using drag and drop

We have fixed an issue with using drag and drop to reorder the primary and secondary measures in the Correlations app.

Measures can now be dragged from one field to the other when the target field is empty, as shown below.

Custom narratives: Year dropped from fields containing month-year values

Previously, Month attributes created from date fields, and other attributes containing month-year values, were incorrectly handled by Custom Narratives: only the month part of the value was passed to the Studio project. For example, Jan-2021 was passed as Jan. This has been fixed.

New NLG Apps

Arria for MicroStrategy 3.2.0 introduces two new out-of-the-box narrative types:

MicroStrategy Workstation for macOS and MicroStrategy Library Mobile for iOS are now supported

Arria for MicroStrategy is now supported in the following products:

NLG Apps: Can't drag and drop when configuring measures for Correlations App

During data configuration, you cannot reorder the primary and secondary measures using drag and drop.

Instead, remove both the primary and secondary measures and re-add them in the desired order.

NLG Apps: Arria custom visualization not refreshed when dataset is replaced

Replacing a dataset that is currently being used by the Arria custom visualization is not supported. To generate a narrative using new data, remove and re-add the visualization before reconfiguring the narrative.

NLG Apps: Empty rows in dataset may result in an error or empty narrative

Empty rows may result in an empty narrative (as shown below) or an error message. To resolve these issues, check for empty rows and exclude them from your dataset.

NLG Apps: Support for additional aggregation and entity types

Arria for MicroStrategy 3.1 introduces NLG Apps support for measures aggregated by Average, Minimum, Maximum, and Count, and precalculated measures such as percentages, ratings, and ratios.

See Aggregation and entity types for further information.

NLG Apps: Support for date fields and non-standard date field names

Previous versions of NLG Apps supported only the following date hierarchy components: year, quarter, month, and day. Fields containing these date components were required to be named Year, Quarter, Month, or Day, respectively.

Arria for MicroStrategy 3.1 introduces NLG Apps support for date fields and for a wider range of recognized field names.

See the NLG Apps Data field names and formats topic for details.

NLG Apps: Increasing the Trend Analysis % may produce invalid Trend Analysis narrative

With some datasets, increasing the Trend Change % value could result in the Trend Analysis app producing an invalid narrative: data was displayed instead of narrative text. This has been fixed.

Support for non-aggregated measures

MicroStrategy does not provide a way to add non-aggregated measures to visualizations. Therefore, at present, raw data that comprises percentages, ratings, and ratios cannot be analyzed by Arria for MicroStrategy.

NLG Apps: US date format handled incorrectly

The mm/dd/yyyy date format is not supported.

If your dates are in the mm/dd/yyyy format, Arria for MicroStrategy should return an error rather than generate a narrative. However, if all dates have a day value of 12 or less, the add-in misinterprets them as dates in the dd/mm/yyyy format (supported) and generates a narrative with incorrect values.

Work around this issue by converting your dates to a supported format:

NLG Apps

NLG Apps (built from a feature formerly known as Configure Narrative) introduces five new out-of-the-box narrative types. In addition to the original Descriptive Statistics, Time-based Variance, and Target-based Variance analyses, you can now analyze and narrate your charts using the Trend Analysis, Ranking Analysis, Describe a Pie Chart, Describe a Bar Chart, and Describe a Line Chart apps.

See NLG Apps for an overview and the NLG Apps directory for details of each app.

Arria Answers

Arria Answers for MicroStrategy is a new conversational-AI platform that integrates with MicroStrategy dashboards to give users real-time access to key insights from data, using natural language-queries.

See Arria Answers for details.

New Arria for BI subscription

To configure Arria for MicroStrategy, you must log in to the visualization with your Arria account credentials and have an Arria for BI license.

See Arria accounts and licenses for details.

Arria-Hosted Private Cloud and Customer-Hosted deployment options

Users of the Arria-Hosted Private Cloud (a.k.a. Dedicated Cloud) and Customer-Hosted (a.k.a. On-Premises) deployment options can no longer use the publicly available Arria for MicroStrategy visualization.

Instead, a unique instance of the add-in configured to call your exclusive Arria for MicroStrategy services, must be installed.

Please contact us for details.

Multiform attributes corrupt data model

In previous releases of Arria for MicroStrategy, multiform attributes were incorrectly handled, resulting in corruption of the data model and incorrect narratives being generated. This has been fixed.

From Arria for MicroStrategy 3.0, all values in a multiform attribute are concatenated into a single value. For example, "Napa","California", "94559" is concatenated to "Napa California 94559".

Changing narrative text color does not persist in published dossiers

When a dossier was published, changes to the text color of the narrative using the Text Color setting were lost. This has been fixed.

Arria for MicroStrategy not supported on Library Mobile for iOS

The Arria custom visualization is not supported on the MicroStrategy Library Mobile for iOS product.

Arria for MicroStrategy not supported in documents on Workstation and Library Mobile

The Arria custom visualization is not supported in MicroStrategy documents on the Workstation and Library Mobile product.

Narratives not automatically refreshed after changing fields in Arria Answers

If you move to Arria Answers from a generated narrative and add or remove fields in the Arria Answers wizard, the narrative is not automatically regenerated to reflect those changes when you return to it.

To refresh the narrative so that it reflects any changes made to fields while on the Arria Answers page, regenerate it from the NLG Apps or Custom Narratives configuration page.

NLG Apps: Increasing the Trend Analysis % may produce invalid Trend Analysis narrative

With some datasets increasing the Trend Change % value can result in the Trend Analysis app producing an invalid narrative; data is displayed instead of narrative text.

NLG Apps: Alias field setting not used in Target-Based Variance narrative

When the Summary or Important Things narrative option is selected in the Target-Based Variance app, the Alias field setting may not be used in the narrative.

Arria Answers: Alias cannot start with the name of another field

There is a known issue when you give a field an alias (e.g. SalesDate) that starts with the name of another field (e.g. Sales). In this case, Arria Answers does not correctly process queries that use the alias: it uses the other field (Sales) instead of the field to which you assigned the alias. This problem is also indicated by incorrect color markup when you type the query.

Custom Narratives: Field names containing brackets not supported by table-type Studio projects

Currently, attribute and metric names containing brackets — for example, Date (Quarter) and Date (Month) — are not supported by table-type Studio projects.

Rename such fields before adding to Arria for MicroStrategy.