Library Cover Pages | Best Practices

Starting with the release of Strategy ONE (March 2024), dossiers are also known as dashboards.

Description

With Library, your Strategy dossiers or documents can now have cover pages.
There are 4 key things to keep in mind when using and designing cover pages:

1. Cover pages can be applied to both Dossiers and Report Services Documents
   
2. Try to keep cover pages as small as possible.
   
3. Use absolute URLs (for now).
   
4. Use REST APIs for a mass update if you have dozens of cover pages to setup.
    
   

Use Cover Pages with Dossier and Report Services Documents

Although it's very easy to set up a cover page for a Dossier, it is hidden for Report Services Documents. For Dossiers, just click on the Cover Page icon from the Table of Contents in Authoring mode. With Report Services Documents, you'll need to use Workstation.
To update the cover pages for Report Services Documents:

1. Go to Workstation.
2. Right click on a Report Services Document.
3. Choose the option Get Info.
4. In the upper left part of the Get Info page, notice the following link: Change Cover Page.
5. Chance the cover page to an image of your choosing.

Note: You can also set-up Cover Pages by using APIs. 
 

Performance Considerations: keep cover pages as small as possible

When creating a library of many dossiers, and each dossier having a specific cover page, the browser has to load all images at once. If every image is 2MB, and you have 50 dossiers, that's 100MB of cover pages to load. This would take quite some time, and have a CPU / RAM impact on your computer and browser. My personal recommendation is to have: < 200KB per cover page.
In terms of dimensions, 360px width should be enough for a timely display.
 

Use Absolute URLs

If you are only using Library on Web, this section may be irrelevant to your work. If you are using Library on Web, Mobile, and/or Desktop, then you should know that cover pages do not display properly on all interfaces if using a relative path (ex: ./images/coverpages/my_cover_page.png).
The way to ensure cover pages work on all interfaces is to user absolute path:
(ex: https://tutorial.Strategy.com/Strategy/images/coverpages/my_cover_page.png)
The downside using the absolute path is that it doesn't really support having multiple environments or doing parallel upgrades.
Fortunately, APIs can help you mass update your cover pages per environment.
 

Use APIs for mass update if you have dozens of cover pages to setup

As described above, cover pages can be updated through Library REST APIs.
Here is a sample PHP code showing the philosophy of interacting with a Dossier's cover page through APIs.
 

Learning Resources

Interested in learning more about Library? Visit the Learning Center on Community!
Feel free to visit the Developer Zone for more on using Library REST APIs.