Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Getting the quarter for a particular date in Reporting Services

Nice, simple, little solution here, but oddly couldn't find anything simple online, so here goes.

If you have a date, and you want to display the quarter for that date (for example, January = 1, April = 2, December = 4), this expression will do the trick (assuming that the date you want to report on is called Modified):

=CEILING(Month(Fields!Modified.Value)/3)

Friday, April 4, 2014

Developing and deploying onto a multi-server farm in SharePoint 2010

Our main SharePoint 2010 farm consists of four servers and one database server.  We originally set up a disaster-recovery environment that was built in the same way, but this has since become our development/testing environment.  One of the servers has Visual Studio 2013 installed, and this is where I do all of my SharePoint 2010 development.

Almost everyone recommends developing on a single-server development farm, and one of the reasons is because Visual Studio can't confidently deploy the development onto the SharePoint site/site collection/web application.  It will often spring up an error:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': Feature with Id 'f8214413-dcb6-428e-9252-032ca228ba03' is not installed in this farm, and cannot be added to this scope.

This is basically occurring because, well, I'm not sure.  I know it doesn't happen on a single-server development environment (or at least, not for the same reason).  But I didn't have a choice; I have to develop on this multi-server farm.

So, my solution.  Since I'm able to use PowerShell successfully to update the SPSolution, I figured I'd just take the wsp file created after building in Visual Studio, and run Update-SPSolution instead.  However, the wsp file is not always updated after Building a solution, only when Deploying.  And since Deploying fails (and often happens to retract the solution and delete web parts), I needed to figure out a way of creating the wsp file without attempting an actual deploy.

What I did was:

  1. Right-click on the project in Visual Studio, and select Properties.
  2. On the left-hand side, select SharePoint to bring up the deployment options.
  3. Click "New..." to create a new Deployment Configuration.
  4. Call it whatever you want, and simply add "Run Pre-Deployment Command" and "Run Post-Deployment Command" into the right-hand box labelled "Selected Deployment Steps".
  5. Click OK, and then change the Active Deployment Configuration to the one you just created.
Now, when you right-click your project and select Deploy, it will create a wsp file and then stop.  You can then run the following command to update your existing SPSolution:

Update-SPSolution -Identity projectname.wsp -LiteralPath "C:\Path To Visual Studio 2013\Projects\SolutionName\ProjectName\bin\Debug\projectname.wsp" -GACDeployment 

You can get the LiteralPath from the output in Visual Studio:

Successfully created package at: C:\Path To Visual Studio 2013\Projects\SolutionName\ProjectName\bin\Debug\projectname.wsp


Sure, you can't Debug in this way, but at least you can continue with your development on a multi-server farm.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Removing people from the SharePoint people picker

For a while now, I've been wondering how to remove people from the SharePoint 2010 people picker (used when adding permissions).  I've had a few occasions where the same person is listed multiple times, due to a bit of a mess-up by my organisation during a few Active Directory migrations.  Each user is normally on a different domain.

No matter how many User Profile syncs I've done, or removed user profiles from the User Profile Service Application, these names are still listed in the people picker.

Finally found a way of removing these accounts once and for all.  Well, there is another way, involving the UserInfo table in WSS_Content database, but that's not recommended by Microsoft.  This is a much safer way.

http://sharepoint/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0

Simply find the account that needs to be deleted, then click Actions, and then Delete From Site Collection.  Instant result.  Just make sure you don't delete someone's actual user account...

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Opening PDFs in the browser in Internet Explorer 9

Our SharePoint 2010 site is designed with the intention of opening PDFs in the browser.  For some users, this works as expected.

However, for some users, PDF links from within document libraries opened separately in Acrobat Reader 11.  This was only affecting PDF links automatically generated within a document library view - if a link was placed directly to a PDF file in the left-hand navigation or a content editor web part, the PDF would always open in the browser.

I've tried the usual things - change Browser File Handling Policy from Strict to Permissive, added "application/pdf" to allowed MIME extensions, etc.  I knew the issue was related more specifically to the browser because Google Chrome was able to consistently open PDFs in the browser.

This is occurring because (from what I can tell) Adobe Acrobat Reader 11 is hijacking SharePoint 2010 PDF links in an effort to integrate better with SharePoint.  This is why document library links are acting differently to direct PDF links.  (It's possible to temporarily subvert this "feature" by holding down Ctrl when clicking on the link to the PDF document, which will open in a new tab, but will be in the browser.)

The reason Chrome and other non-IE browsers aren't affected by this is because Chrome et al have their own PDF rendering techniques, whereas IE relies on ActiveX plugins by Adobe or others.

It seems the only way to permanently fix this is a registry hack (from page 124 of the Acrobat Enterprise Administration Guide):

  1. Open the registry.
  2. Go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\<ProductName>\<version>\FeatureLockDown.
  3. Create a key called cSharePoint.
  4. Create a DWORD value called bDisableSharePointFeatures.
  5. Set its value to 1.
Unfortunately, I have to now persuade our IT department to roll out this registry hack to all users...

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Sandboxed code sometimes failing with "Sandboxed code execution request failed"

Nice and short one here (which unfortunately took me a long time to pin down).  I have a simple webpart running in a sandboxed solution.  The webpart has a label and a button, and there is no other code-behind.

Sometimes, when rendering the web part, I get the error:

[SPUserCodeExecutionPipelineFailedException: Sandboxed code execution request failed.]

It's not a nice error but it only appears sometimes.  I'm running on a four-server farm so I assumed it was something to do with the sandboxed code service not running on one of the servers.  However, the service was running on all of them.

It's probably not solved anything (but it's a development environment so I'm not too bothered), but I found a workaround:

  1. Go to Central Administration
  2. Click on System Settings, and then Manage user solutions
  3. In this screen, select "All sandboxed code runs on the same machine as a request".
  4. Click OK.

The webpart now works reliably.  I'm assuming one of my servers isn't happy with the sandbox service credentials but I can move on with my life for now.