Most people don't realize just how extensible CUIS is. You can do a lot with it, however, if you know what you're doing.

For example, most people don't realize that you can build a completely custom display using custom-built XSLT files. It's true! You can give CUIS your own stylesheets, and then tell the report to use that stylesheet instead of the default displays.

If you're not familiar with XSLT, it allows you to take raw XML data and transform it into something useful, like an HTML page for the Web. It's a template for data, and people have done some very innovative things with this including building reports that print packing slips, implementing custom Javascript data displays, and so on. You could also transform CUIS data to another XML format for input into another system.

To make an XSLT available just put it in the CuisWeb\UserFiles\XSLT directory. The XML schema isn't documented anywhere but it's pretty simple, I would recommend using the XSLT files already in that directory as an example.

CUIS passes the report data in XML format to the XSLT, does the transformation, and displays the result.

Only thing to keep in mind is that you won't get support on XSLT's, it's considered completely custom work. You really have to be a technical person with knowledge of XML and XSLT to do cool things with this.

Another thing that people don't realize is that you can get report data directly as XML from CUIC!

Another one that I'm surprised people haven't figured out is that you can create your own stylesheets to give CUIS 7.5 a custom look. If you know CSS, you can create a new CSS file, put it in the CuisWeb\UserFiles\CSS directory. Again, this isn't documented, you'll have to use the existing CSS files as guides and modify them to suite your purpose.

One interesting thing to try is embedding CUIC inside of other applications! Using report permalinks, you can call, filter, and display a report just by calling a URL. Just right-click a report in the report manager, click on Report Info, and there's the URL down there. Embed CUIS reports inside of your own applications!

And you knew that you could embed Web pages in a dashboard, right? You can create a dashboard item that displays a URL. Some customers use this as a simple bookmarking system, by putting their internal systems in different dashboards so they can flip between them and see the relevant reports next to them.

Hope this post sparks some innovative ideas on how to use CUIC 7.5!

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