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

I am currently working in a consultant company offers MS solution in my home country. We split in to several groups base on our skills and experience. Each of the group will focus on certain technology such as MS CRM, Axapta, Business Intelligence, SharePoint, .net development and etc. I am in the SharePoint and .net development team. Recently, I got chance to work in MS Business intelligence like SSAS, SSRS, BSM and the latest MS Performance Point Server 2007. Hence, I seldom post much articles on SharePoint. However, I got some colleagues actively working in SharePoint and always share their problem and solution among our team. So, I plan to put these useful posts in to this blog as well. Just to share out and for my own reference too. Check out the posts soon!

* Special thanks to SC, Abi, LJ and RC who share out their problem and solution. I will put in their full name if they agree to do so

I come across some problems in Reporting Services 2005 in SharePoint integration mode when using Navigation - Jump to URL. Here are some strange behaviors on the problem:

1. The link won’t work if you link to a page/item inside a SharePoint List.

2. The link is OK if you link to invalid page/item in a SharePoint List (invalid item name but valid path)

3. The link is OK if you link to other site like http://www.microsoft.com or http://www.ajaxworkspace.com

I tried googling around but can’t find any solid solution. But I found out that we can use JavaScript as a workaround to solve this issue. Replace your Jump to URL format from:

= “http://servername/sitename/documentlist/pagename.aspx”

With

= “javascript:window.location.href= ‘http://servername/sitename/documentlist/pagename.aspx ‘;”

It works for me!

P/s: Does anybody know where to find the restriction rules for error “Other restrictions apply. (rsInvalidItemPath)” in order to construct a valid URL path for reporting services?

I recently got chance to work on RadEditor control. It works fine in my local development environment. However, where I try to deploy the my application in to win2003 server. It give me permission error. Here are the details error happened to me.

1. Show page not found

2. Show 400 Bad request

3. Show permission denied

4. Debug the javascript and getting permission denied error.

Appreciate if anyone come across the same issue and point out the hints!

Update 2 June 2008

- I found that there my master page contains some CSS that cause the error:

<!–[if IE]>
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
#menu ul li {float: left; width: 100%;}
body {
behavior: url(<http://www.mysite.com/css/csshover2.htc);
font-size: 100%;
}
</style>
<![endif]–>

This also explain why it only happen in IE browser. But the funny thing is this simple script can cause radEditor become malfunction and it only happen in certain conditions.

I am trying to setup SQL Session State database but encountered error as below:

An error occurred during the execution of the SQL file ‘InstallSqlState.sql’. The SQL error number is 229 and the SqlException message is: EXECUTE permission denied on object ’sp_delete_job’, database ‘msdb’, schema ‘dbo’.If the job does not exist, an error from msdb.dbo.sp_delete_job is expected.
SQL Server: sql2005.valuethai.com
Database: [vtdb_ss]
SQL file loaded:
InstallSqlState.sql
Commands failed:…

Here is the command run by me:
aspnet_regsql.exe -S [sqlservername] -U [userid] -P [userpassword] -ssadd -sstype c -d [customdatabase]

After doing some debugging, I manage to solve it by assigning enough rights to msdb database. Once I map msdb to db_owner/public, it works fine.

SSRS provide table and matrix control to let user populate data in different scenario. Table control let user to populate simple format of data where fixed columns applied and rows grow dynamically. Matrix provide more powerful features where it columns and rows can be dynamically grow. In that case, writing a store procedure to support a matrix become easier in some scenarios.

E.g. you have a source table Sales with data below:

You need to generate a sales report with the following format:

You can simply write a SP as below and bind the columns to products and rows to ClientID:

SELECT ClientID, Product, Sum(SalesAmount) FROM Sales GROUP BY ClientID, Product

This solution seems pretty simple and straight forward. However, this will only work fines if you have small set of record in your tables. If you have hundred thousand of records with >20 type of products in your table, this solution no longer perfect. You will be facing performance issues. Yes, Matrix control very slow when deal with large amount of data.

Read the rest of this entry »

Developing, deploying and managing event handlers in SharePoint 2007 is a pain. Luckly, some one aready built the tools to manage these problems. Thanks to my colleague, SC who found out this tools. The GUI tool allows you to point to a specific list/doclib/web which you want to hook your custom event handler to it. 

Do check out the tools here:
http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/Patrick/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1547

Here are some resources regarding Moss which I get from my colleague, LJ. There are good resources for every sharepoint developer. Here you go:

MOSS Form Based Authentications
Part 1 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb975136.aspx
Part 2 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb975135.aspx
Part 3 - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977430.aspx

MOSS Alternate Access Mappings
Part 1 - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/06/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-1.aspx
Part 2 - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/19/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-2-of-3.aspx
Part 3 - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/04/18/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-3-of-3.aspx

**Thanks ot LJ who willing to share out the resources!

Simple error when trying to setup single sign on in Sharepoint 2007. Error: 

Please make sure you login as MS Single sign-on service account to configure it. Do check out here for more. http://cs.grossmann.com/blogs/fg/archive/2007/09/02/setting-up-single-sign-on-in-sharepoint-2007-errors.aspx

One of my colleague found out one funny bug in moss 2007. Here are the steps to reproduce it:

1. Add the content query web part, set to query items from page libraries from the whole site collection. (this should be default).
2. Add filter on “Scheduling End Date” and set to a specific date
3. Apply the setting and close the web part properties pane
4. Open back the properties pane, settings for the date are gone, and went back to [Today]. 

This seems like a bug in MOSS 2007.  The bug still exist after install SP1. Do let me know if anybody out there having the same problem and solutions.

p/s: My colleague already contacted a MS guy in my region. I will update this blog once got any feedback from them.

This is a common mistake when try to start a MOSS search services:

An unhandled exception occurred in the user interface.Exception Information: OSearch (Administrator)

This error occur when you do not specific the machinename in your username. you must put in fulll name. e.g. mossadministrator.