PowerPivotGeek » Tips and Tricks

Using a SharePoint list as a data source

powerpivotgeek — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:57:00 +0000

Updated 28-Oct-2010: Some folks are reporting that an iisreset is needed to make the updates visible to SharePoint.

So . . . here I am playing around with PowerPivot to get ready for a demo. As this is a group from the SharePoint dev team (actually SharePoint Online), I wanted to include some cool SharePoint functionality into the demo. Trying to be cool and ‘wow’ them, I decide to use a SharePoint list as a data source. I want to show the data mashup capabilities of PowerPivot so I have the bulk of my demo come from the Contoso sample database (the three product catalog tables) and the 4 million row Sales Fact table.

I create my SP list by extracting the 11 distinct manufacturers – and I assign them to a ‘shipper’ that I made up.

When I go to SharePoint an click on:

PowerPivot comes up but it returns an error:

"For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document. To enable DTD processing set the ProhibitDtd property on XmlReaderSettings to false and pass the settings into XmlReader.Create method."

So it turns out that I forgot (it happens to the best of us) to install the ADO.NET Data Services 3.5 SP1, located here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3e102d74-37bf-4c1e-9da6-5175644fe22d

Which I would have known if I had taken my own advice and read BOL beforehand. Read the “New server” installation notes here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210708.aspx#nextsteps

So the moral of the story is: RTFM

After installing ADO.NET Data Services on my SharePoint site, I was able to bring up the data feed in PowerPivot – setup the relationship between the Manufacturer field in the SharePoint list and the Manufacturer field in the Contoso database and I was off and running . . . I also setup daily data refresh job . . . and I could see the Gallery snapshot changing as I entered new data into the SharePoint list . . WOW!

Enjoy!

When is the field list not the field list?

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:21:33 +0000

So I am playing around with the PowerPivot add-in constructing a new sample application. I’ve got the data and I am inserting pivot tables in my worksheets. All of a sudden I noticed that the field list isn’t the PowerPivot field list – it is the Excel field list. What happened? (I never did figure it out) – but more importantly how do I get it back?

Trick: In Excel, click on your pivot table data. Most of the time the PowerPivot field list comes back. If that doesn’t then go to the Excel ribbon, select the ‘PowerPivot’ tab, and click on the ‘Field List’ button. Now you should see it.

Enjoy.

_-_-_ Dave

Cheat sheet: Pointer to the right installation instructions

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 02:11:20 +0000

1 — Is this a single machine farm? Will it be used for departmental use? Then go for “New Server”: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210708.aspx This is NOT a standalone machine in SharePoint terms (PowerPivot does not support standalone SharePoint installations) — It is a full farm with all the capabilities of a farm, it is just that we have a single machine so far.

Another interesting resource is a 4-part video series available here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/install-powerpivot-for-sharepoint-on-a-domain-controller.aspx. This shows you how to install a single “All-In-1″ standalone PowerPivot server with the domain controller role installed, SharePoint, and a “New Server” installation. Very useful if you want to build your first demo system; particularly if you want it installed on a laptop (you must have a domain controller if you disconnect from the network).

2 — If you change your mind and wish to later *add* a server to this single server farm, then use: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210610.aspx for them — However you might want to move your RDBMS off to another machine prior to doing that. Look to the SharePoint BOL for how to move the content and config databases to another server in the farm.

3 — Is this an existing SharePoint farm? If Yes, then is this the first server you are installing PowerPivot? If so, use: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210616.aspx Is this the 2nd or later server you are installing PowerPivot? If so, use: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210610.aspx

_-_-_ Dave

Get out your pocket book

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:53:11 +0000

Make sure you buy *big* disks for your system drive!

I just ran into an interesting thread from one of the SharePoint support forums. As I am sure that you are aware of (sic) SharePoint has a new high severity health rule for SharePoint 2010 that raises an error if your machines does not have 2X the amount of physical memory in free disk space. Yep, that’s right. I will leave it as an exercise for the student to investigate why, but this has a BIG impact on PowerPivot servers.

If you have a large memory machine, for example both DELL and HP now have low-end servers with 256GB of physical memory on them, this means that you must have 512GB of free disk space on them or the SP health rules will start kicking in. While this is not common for SharePoint servers to have this kind of memory (SharePoint typically runs on web server-class machines); it is a good idea for PowerPivot servers to have lots and lots of memory (PowerPivot is an in-memory service that needs database server-class machines). PowerPivot has a HUGE demand for memory.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Dashboard

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:51:35 +0000

I having been playing around with a new SharePoint 2010 feature called the Developer Dashboard. It is a great tool to use when figuring out how your pages work behind the scenes.

See some previous postings on the topic here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2009/10/28/using-the-developer-dashboard-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx
http://powerpivotgeek.com/2010/05/18/enabling-the-sharepoint-developer-dashboard/

To disable the Developer Dashboard:

STSADM.exe –o setproperty –pn developer-dashboard –pv Off

Then enable the Developer Dashboard with OnDemand Switch :

STSADM.exe –o setproperty –pn developer-dashboard –pv [ OnDemand | On | Off ]

‘OnDemand’ turns the Dashboard on, but hides it until the click of an icon beside the ‘Open Menu’ on the top of the SharePoint page.

Very cool stuff!

_-_-_ Dave

A Peek Inside: Special steps for Excel Services-only app servers

powerpivotgeek — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:50:08 +0000

It has been a while since I did one of the “A Peek Inside” postings and I thought “what the heck . . . do I have anything better to do while I am visiting with my in-laws during a vacation” . . . I couldn’t think of one so here goes.

PowerPivot has some special steps that have to be done to get all of our components in and running on an Excel Services-only app server. While we document what these steps are, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210608.aspx , we don’t describe why this is an issue – thus this is a great “A Peek Inside” topic.

First, the root cause is that SharePoint 2010 ships with the SQL Server 2008 SP2 version of the msolap OLE DB provider; NOT THE POWERPIVOT R2 version. I won’t bore you with why this was done, but it was. Thus as the BOL entry tells you, the administrator must go to the R2 feature pack and manually install the R2 version of the msolap OLE DB provider. Sure that is it . . . right? Well, unfortunately it isn’t.

The distribution is purposely missing a required component, called the ChannelTransport.dll, that is used by the SharePoint PowerPivot implementation to communicate from the Excel Services app server to the PowerPivot System Service. When the PowerPivot installation is done on the same machine as Excel Services this DLL is automatically installed and registered. But how does that happen on the Excel Services machines? That is a piece of black magic and is the topic of this “A Peek Inside”.

The Microsoft.AnalysisServices.ChannelTransport.dll is actually deployed as a two step process:

Getting the .dll file physically onto the Excel Services machine. To do this, the file is included in the PowerPivot global solution. When this solution is deployed out onto the SharePoint farm, it is physically copied to each machine. Actually it is serialized into the config db and then a timer job on each machine re-hydrates the file and copies it into the target folder. The problem is that while the solution can copy the file, it cannot regasm it.
To regasm it, and get a load of this one, we use a health rule. There is a health rule that is deployed with PowerPivot that fires on each machine in the SharePoint farm. It looks to see if the ChannelTransport.dll is available (in the correct, deployed folder) but not registered. If so, the health rule does a regasm on it. Now the Excel Services machine can communicate with PowerPivot . . .

Now that is a nasty piece of geek black magic.

Enjoy!

_-_-_ Dave

Whitepaper: “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About PowerPivot Data Refresh but Were Afraid to Ask”

powerpivotgeek — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:08:35 +0000

Is now available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff976569.aspx

Enjoy!

SharePoint 2010 revised ULSViewer

powerpivotgeek — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 05:56:09 +0000

From time to time I get questions from folks asking me “What is the best debugging tool for PowerPivot?” – The Answer is that there is clear cut favorite and it is EXTREMELY useful, but I didn’t know that it was released to the public. Well . . . after some investigation, it looks like it is available – not only that, it has been for a while. But better late than never . . take a look at it!

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer

From the Codeplex docs:

The ULSViewer tool performs various actions against the data from ULS log files in order to better analyze it. ULSViewer allows the user to:

Highlight data of importance to the user on the fly
Bookmark log entries
Append logs to other logs in order to track trends
Hide unimportant data
Only view critical log entries by sorting data by severity
Write rules to prompt the user when certain events occur
View your data in a spreadsheet instead of the text file ULS generates
Monitor remote machines logs that are running ULS services <—my favorite feature!
Open multiple logs at the same time in order to compare log files.
Open logs files from multiple machines at the same time.

Enjoy!

Howto: Get more flexibility when importing data from text files

powerpivotgeek — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:06:00 +0000

Updated: 18-Aug-2010

Microsoft does not recommend or support the use of Office applications in a server-side environment (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757 ). In the case of PowerPivot, the data refresh facility is implemented within an NT Service and, as such, falls under this restriction. In this article we will use the ACE provider to give you more control over importing text files. So long as the importing of data is done using the PowerPivot for Excel add-in, then you in a supported environment. However you should not be refreshing the data on the server as that uses the ACE provider in an unsupported environment.

Question: By default PowerPivot has two limitations when working with text files (using the Office ACE OLE DB provider): (1) will only import data from files with an extension of .txt, .tab, and .csv; and (2) it will only recognize tab, comma, semicolon, space, colon, and vertical bar and column delimiters. Is there a way to change PowerPivot’s configuration so that it will recognize other file extensions or column delimiters?

Answer: Yup — that is a technical term. You can use a schema.ini file in the same directory as the imported text file to specify all kinds of things that aren’t available through the PowerPivot UI, including fixed column rather than delimited text file format. Here’s a web page with the info:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms709353(VS.85).aspx

(Thanks to Ron Pihlgren for this solution. Ron is the PowerPivot client test lead – and his blog is included in my blogroll.)

Enjoy.

Don’t forget your Central Admin when creating AAM entries

powerpivotgeek — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:41:18 +0000

(my thanks to Dan English http://denglishbi.spaces.live.com/ for the solution in this post)

Dan’s system failed trying to bring up the Workbook Activity or Server Health workbooks as part of the PowerPivot Management Dashboard in Central Admin. The error was: “The file that you selected could not be found. Check the spelling of the file name and verify that the location is correct”. The file was there; he could be seen it using WebDAV “\\ServerName@CAPort#\PowerPivot Management\\1033\Workbook Activity.xlsx” or the UI:

and then:

but it could not be accessed via CA.

Dan ultimately solved the problem by recognizing that he had configured AAM for the user visible Web Application, but since he didn’t configure the AAM name for CA, the system could not see the file. He added the AAM entry for both the affected web application and the CA web application and all worked as expected.

Moral of the Story: If you get “file not found” errors on SharePoint (particularly system files), two ideas should immediately pop into your head: (1) AAM server naming might be off (remember you need AAM mappings for IP addresses as well as ‘names’ in SharePoint – folks frequently forget that); or features could be disabled (some services register and deregister components if the feature is activated or not).

All-in-all, a GREAT catch by Dan – with my thanks.

Enjoy!