Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Link on reporting service

Did you receive the error below?

Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; Tablet PC 2.0)

Timestamp: Wed, 15 May 2013 22:03:02 UTC

Message: Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerParserErrorException: The message received from the server could not be parsed. Common causes for this error are when the response is modified by calls to Response.Write(), response filters, HttpModules, or server trace is enabled.

Details: Error parsing near '

Line: 5
Char: 62099
Code: 0

The cause for me was the following 

The Problem:


I have reporting services installed in SharePoint 201 SP1. I have two reports and they both take parameters. The main report has parameters that use the parameter panel and the user specifies the parameters they want. The second report uses the parameter panel, but it should not since it is taking the parameters from a link on the main report that passes the parameter to the second report. Only one report can use the panel. The Back to the Parent Report link in Reporting Services doesn’t seem to support the scenario where both reports are using the parameter panel.

To reproduce the problem, I did the following.
1. Bring up the main report and run with some parameters.
2. Click the link that takes me to the secondary report.
3. Click the Back to the Parent Report button.
4. Click the link that takes me to the secondary report
This time, the screen redraws and I get the above JavaScript error.


The Solution:

Change the parameter type on the second report to be Hidden. This will cause the parameter to not be shown in the UI when the second report is shown. This will fix the problem. Another solution is for the main report to not have any parameters, but that is usually not feasible since users typically will need to interact with it.



To change the parameter to Hidden do the following:

1. Open the report in Report Builder

2. Go to Report Data |
Parameters and expand the list of parameters

3. Right-click on each of the parameters and do the following

4. Select the Parameter Properties menu item.

5. Under the General tab change the Select parameter visibility radio button to Hidden.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

ECM Components

Below is my understanding of the major components of ECM (Capture, Store, Manage, Preserve, and Deliver) and their sub-components.




Monday, May 13, 2013

Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) Offering

Microsoft offers some nice capabilities using tools like Excel and SharePoint that we are already familiar with. If your company is already vested in Microsoft technologies, the MS BI tools are worth looking at.

I have summarized (not pretty diagrams or anything) the basics below for easy consumption. I also have a PowerPoint slide with nice architctural diagrams, etc. Click here to view the PowerPoint slides.

Below is an overview of what they offer:

SharePoint
  • PerformancePoint
  • Excel Services
  • Power view
  • PowerPivot for SharePoint
SQL Server 2012
  •  SQL Server
  • Reporting Services
  • Analysis Services
  • Data Mining
  • Master Data Services
  • Data Quality Services
  • Integration Services
  • Data Warehousing
  • SQL Server Data Tools (formerly BI Development Studio)
Desktop
  • Excel
    • Data Explorer for Excel
    • PowerPivot for Excel
    • Power View for Excel
    • Data Mining for Excel

Below are some more details on the specific products


Power View

  • For both SharePoint and Excel
  • Part of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2012
  • It provides an ad-hoc visualization experience in SQL Server Reporting Services
  • Power View provides intuitive data visualization of PowerPivot models and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) tabular mode databases
  • Users can edit views or create new ones
  • Very interactive
  • Very easy to use
  • Encourages Data Exploration and Visualization
  • Also available in Excel as an Add-in
  • Click to filter technology
  • Automatically creates data model

 PowerPivot

  • For both SharePoint and Excel
  • PowerPivot is an add-in that lets end users gather, store, model, and analyze large amounts of data in Excel
  • Use Excel to create a PowerPivot
  • Save to SharePoint for others to access.
  • Viewable in the SharePoint Gallery
  • In-Memory technologies allows working with Millions of rows of data
  • Mashup data from different data sources
  • Create Pivot tables, Charts, and PKIs on millions of rows of data.

PerformancePoint

  • Aimed at Advanced PowerUsers, but more likely will be used by developers
  • Integrated into SharePoint
  • Provides designer as well
  • Left-click Drill down into data
  • Types of visualizations
    • Dashboard
    • ScorecardReports
  • Highly Interactive
  • Limited customization of the look and feel of report or dashboard
  • Uses OLAP data sources
  • Special designer accessible via SharePoint to design everything

Excel Services

  • Excel Services on the other hand is a very power user-friendly technology.  Those familiar with Excel and PivotTables should take very little time to be able to build very sophisticated reports.  SharePoint 2010 renders Excel reports and dashboards as web pages which makes this technology very easy to deploy. 
  • Good choice for self-service BI scenarios
  • Show an Excel sheet or workbook on a SharePoint site in a web part.
  • Can show Power View Excel sheets on the web and keep the high level of interactivity.

Data Mining add-in for Excel

  • Uses Analysis Services on the backend
  • Excel User interface
  • Supports:
    • Classify 
    • Estimate 
    • Cluster 
    • Associate 
    • Forecast 
    • Other advanced algorithms

Data Explorer add-in for Excel

  • Still in preview status 
  • Explore data 
  • Brings new data sources to Excel import options. 
  • Like SSIS, but for Excel 
  • ETL tool for Excel 
  • Extract: DB, Excel, Text file, web, OData, SharePoint lists, Active Directory, Multiple data source support 
  • Transform: Cleanse, apply business rules, aggregate, merge, append, mashups, Navigate through data (even joined data) 
  • Load: Load data into Excel once massage it to what we want

Master Data add-in for Excel

  • Connects to MDS data sources / models
  • Allows end users to create and maintain data in MDS using Excel

For lots of resource on the above click here.