Many Strategy administrators are interested in knowing whether a user making a simple formatting change to a report, would will affect a cache that is already present for the report in Strategy Intelligence Server.
Some formatting changes may be:
With current versions of Strategy, there are two different types of reports - "Standard Reports" and "OLAP Reports" (where report objects has more objects than on the template).
For Standard Reports, any change made to the report that will affect the template definition will cause the cache to be invalidated. The reason is that the report now uses a different 'version' of the template. Although the user does not see this individual template object that is part of every report, they are embedded within the report definition. This template object and also an embedded filter object are what identify what cache will be used when a report is executed. The same GUID and version ID need to be matched up to a cache for it to be used, and since this has changed due to formatting changes, it cannot use the same cache.
For OLAP Reports, the situation is somewhat different. These reports, under certain circumstances will be saved with two different templates - a "base template" and a "view template". This is only done when the objects viewed on the report are a subset of the objects in the Report Object window. In this case any formatting changes made to the template, as well as any switching between the objects on the report and the ones in the report objects windows will be saved to the view template. Since the view template is a separate object from the base template, this scenario could be used advantageously to share caches when the base template is not embedded within the report itself. This will still be subject to the condition that there should be a difference between the total objects on the report and the ones in the report objects window necessating that the view template be used. If there is no view template created for an OLAP report, or the base template is part of the report definition itself, the sames rule as those for the standard report will apply as far as saved changes and invalidation of caches.
The observed behaviour for saving changes for OLAP reports with a shortcut to the base template may also vary slightly because of differences between the Strategy Desktop and Strategy Web clients. One known issue with the saving of autostyle and attribute form display changes is documented in the Technical Note:
When the report is saved with changes to the template object, Strategy Intelligence Server will recognize that the cache is no longer valid and it will be marked as Invalid so that the next time the report is executed, a new cache will be created.
