SharePoint, .Net, SQL, MS BI, Collaboration and Gadgets

Yes.  SharePoint Server 2010 is coming soon. Microsoft call it “The Business Collaboration Platform for the enterprise and the web”. Here are links where you can find more about it.

From Microsoft:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Pages/Default.aspx

Setting up Development Machine:
http://sharepointdevwiki.com/display/sp2010/Building+a+SharePoint+2010+Development+machine
http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/2009/09/microsoft-virtual-catch-64.html
http://www.synergyonline.com/blog/blog-moss/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=82

SharePoint Conference 2009 PressPass:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/sharepoint/Default.aspx

While everyone started to get familiar with SharePoint 2007, now it come the new version. It;s time to catch up and learn again…. ^-^

The grid column widths are not auto-fitted. For example, column totals are often covered and required manual adjustment as display below:

Desired outcome:

For column or row totals, it is well adjusted to display the figure fully. Or similarly in Excel, by highlighting columns or rows, user is able to right click and adjust the column or row width.

This is the feedback from MS Support, PDP does not adjust column wide for the Grand Total, because it’s bold format. Hopefully next release will fix these minor bug.

Another ProClarity issue from my recent project.When selecting a different data member from the slicer/dimension background page filter (ie: time dimension, dimension), the report title on top disappears. At the same time, the selected report is no longer highlighted at the left hand panel as illustrated below.

As a result, user is not able to identify which report that was selected. If it is just a change of dimension member data, ProClarity still highlight the selected report.

We raise this issue to Microsoft support and here are the result/workaround:

Assessment/ Feedback
==================
This is by Design.
Workaround: click grid properties, and select Title - check Visible and check Preserve Title, and of course give it the “same” name as the page name.
Then click apply, and resave this page

Hope this can benefit someone out there.

When a security role (incorporate with SSAS cube security) is created to enable a specific user to view limited dimension member data, the publish page/report view in Web Standard is automatically disabled with the following message:

This page is not available now. Please choose another page.
It is base on a member that has changed or is available.

Here are the steps to reproduce the issue.

I am using “AdventureWorksBI.msi” from http://www.codeplex.com/MSFTDBProdSamples/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4004

1. Create an administrator role and assign a user A into it

2. Create an Australia role and assign user B into it

3. Set Dimension Data security for Geography.Country to Australia only.

4. In ProClarity Desktop Professional, a Decomposition Tree chart as below:

5. Expand All Customers, expand United Kingdom and save as a briefing book.

6. Publish this book to PAS. Login using Australia Role member - User B to view the report in web standard. The following error will occur.

7. Login using Administrator Role member - User A to view the report in web standard. It works fine!

It seems like a product limitation. We raise this issue to Microsoft support and these is what we get:

Read the rest of this entry »

Using ProClarity function to change actual figure to percentage in grid and then when exported to Excel, percentage turn back to actual figures

Click OK

Desired outcome:

Exported data from ProClarity to Excel should display the same format, ie, if ProClarity is showing percentage, then when exported to Excel, it should also display percentage.

Feedback from MS Support:

This is by design.
Workaround is to use the COPY feature in PRO and paste than in excel.

Personally i think this is a bit weird since PDP known as a powerful analysis tool. It should able to handle all these minor features.

<!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:”Cambria Math”; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:1; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:”"; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} .MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:10.0pt; line-height:115%;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

In PDP, if the cells are empty value, it will not display 0 automatically:

Apparently, this is cube issue - The value of ‘NULL PROCESSING’ property for the measure:
Find out more here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlanalysisservices/thread/8edf2bff-cc62-4286-90d0-28e957306b86

Here is good article explain the error in proclarity web standard.

http://blogs.technet.com/proclarity/archive/2008/04/08/cube-cannot-be-found.aspx

As some of you aware, SQL IN clause is known as “slow” operator. This is very true when you come to big number of keys to search in the IN clause. E.g.

SELECT XXX
FROM Sales
WHERE CustomerID IN (SELECT CustomerID FROM @SearchCustomer)

** @SearchCustomer is a table variable consist of all the customerid (e.g. 20,000 IDs).

To accomplish the same result, we can always write it as:

SELECT XXX
FROM Sales S
INNER JOIN @SearchCustomer SC
ON S.CustomerID = SC.CustomerID

The result can be improved significantly. For my case, old query that take 5 minutes to execute can be done in 20 seconds with the new query.

I am sure some of you might experience the annoying auto postback on SSRS report parameters. It will postback every time you change the value of the parameter even there do not have any dependencies at all. I am having this problem for several reports with quite a number of parameters. I tried googling but doesn’t help much. After some try and error, I manage to fix some of it (not 100%). This is cause by how we input the default value on the report parameters and dataset parameters. For example, you need to set the default value “100” to a parameter. Some of you might put in “=100”. Try to change it to “100” without the “=” sign. This stupid “=” sign is causing my report to keep on post back for every change. You might need to apply the same rules at your dataset parameters. I am not sure it is 100% works but at least it solves most of my reports. Hope this can help! Do let me know if you got better solution!

As usual, we need crystal report merge module when creating deployment package for VS2005 with crystal report. I thought we can get it easily out there. Surprisingly, I took quite some times to search and found it at here:

http://resources.businessobjects.com/support/additional_downloads/runtime.asp#07

Supprising