Guernsey on Matt Thornton

This functionality is unavailable for fields not associated with a list

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 17:36:59 +0000

Ah, the danger of the Internet. I hit this problem - trying to update a field built-in to a content type (the Title field) so that it was hidden from the UI. Easy I thought, get the SPWeb, get the SPContentType, find the field (ct.Fields[“Title”]), set it to hidden and update it. Nope.

Exception: This functionality is unavailable for fields not associated with a list

Engaging my brain / memory resolved this, but not before I encountered numerous “helpful” posts on the web about how what I was trying to do was not possible. One such example here, which categorically stated…

SharePoint Features + Renaming

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 12:14:15 +0000

This is a fun one. In some of our Visual Studio solutions we use the period character - “.” - for project naming which broadly reflects the namespaces in use.

However, this causes issues for Visual Studio namely in the ability to rename features. So when you create a feature, it will adopt a default name of Feature1 and it’s not possible to rename it directly from within the solution.

Fortunately, there’s a nifty workaround that does appear to work, without having to redo your solution/project structure and naming convention. Found via this post:

Sharepoint 2010 + Internal Field Name Max Length

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 13:05:27 +0000

Little reminder about something that has just kept me busy for the last hour or so - internal field names in SharePoint lists have a max length of 32 characters. SharePoint treats this a little bizarrely - it will create the column but then truncate the internal field name. Thus is you’re doing this programmatically - and then depending on the column existing with that particular field name, things will fall over. You’ll probably see an error like

gnucash + mysql + OS X 10.10: getting it running

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 15:05:53 +0000

This post will help you to get gnucash running with MySQL on OS X 10.10.

Background

I do the bookkeeping and accounts for a variety of small NFPs or charitable organisations. I recently moved my bookkeeping for these from a combination of Sharepoint (seriously) and SSRS and Excel in to Gnucash. I had been looking for a decent free app for a while and whilst there are some interesting cloud options (in fact there are a million options) I stumbled across Gnucash - a nice looking open source, cross-platform tool that would work on my Mac (without X11) and decided to go for it.

Two useful SharePoint Powershell links

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 18:35:19 +0000

I continue to do some work in SharePoint 2010 which means I continue to trip over weird issues.

Issue 1: Error creating content type. A duplicate content type was found.

Matt covers this issue:

If you’ve gotten this error and come to this site looking for answers, chances are it isn’t simply because the name you’re trying to give a new content type is already in use. On the contrary, you are probably sitting there saying that you know without a doubt the name you are entering is not in use, and you have probably even pounded a random value out on your keyboard just to prove the point.

Event ID: 1108 SQL Server Reporting Services cannot load the SQLPDW extension

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 17:33:57 +0000

This event log error will occur in Sharepoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013 environments with SQL Server 2012 and SSRS in integrated mode. You will see either

“SQL Server Reporting Services Shared Service cannot load the SQLPDW extension. (Application: [service app name]. CorrelationId: etc.)”

“SQL Server Reporting Services Shared Service cannot load the TERADATA extension. (Application: [service app name]. CorrelationId: etc.)”

This link explains some of the reasoning behind it.

This error occurs because the Teradata extension is registered in the Reporting Services configuration file by default, but the Teradata assemblies are not shipped with SQL Server 2008 or as part of the .NET Framework. If the error message does not bother you, you can ignore the error when it is logged.

SharePoint list views filtered by date AND time

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 12:41:56 +0000

There are a huge number of articles out there discussing how to create (semi-) dynamic list views or filters based on some volatile property like current time. For instance: “Show me all documents that were created today” or “Show me all documents that were created more than 7 days ago” or “Show me all in tasks due in the next three days”. The solution to this is some combination of a list view filter, or calculated column, and the use of a property like [Today]. (Note: There are a couple of key caveats to do with this.)

A limitation of this, however, is that the time portion of a datetime is ignored. So when I wanted to “show all documents created in the last 10 minutes” - I couldn’t. There were a few workarounds - various combinations of calculated columns, using SharePoint Designer and so on were available - but I was determined to find a solution that didn’t require any of this!

Debugging SharePoint 2010

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 11:50:25 +0000

I’m posting this here as, despite using this all the time, I still find myself looking it up.

There are a couple of things you can do, in your Dev environment, to assist with debugging SharePoint and your custom solutions.

CustomErrors and SafeMode

This should only be used in a Dev environment, but you can disable the “friendly” error messages in SharePoint and replace them with full exceptions, and, if desirable, a stack trace.

You can edit the web.config for your application. Note: SharePoint has various web.configs spewed about the place, and for this to work, you need to edit the one located in

SharePoint 2010 workflow stuck on starting

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 13:20:22 +0000

Using SharePoint Workflow (in fact, Nintex, but it applies to “standard” SharePoint workflow, after all, Nintex is just standard workflow with a few bells and whistles) on a document library and a workflow that is set to auto-start on document creation.

The symptoms were: if you add a document to the library, then the workflow fires, but it sits forever in a state of “starting”. However, if you manually start the workflow on the same document, then it runs absolutely fine.

SharePoint 2010 + SSRS Integrated mode + deploy + login prompt

Wed, 02 Oct 2013 10:52:48 +0000

If you try to deploy an SSRS report from Visual Studio to your SharePoint environment, where SSRS has been configured in Integrated Mode, using the built-in deployment mechanism, you may encounter a situation where you are endlessly prompted for login boxes, and no account details seem to help.

There is some useful info out there about what causes this - typically a mismatch where you’re using Kerberos authentication. There’s a good post and some resolution here.

Exception occured while connecting to WCF endpoint: An unsecured or incorrectly secured fault was received from the other party

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:30:00 +0000

When SharePoint goes bad: spurious error messages in the ULS logs that will lead you down a blind path. ULS logs were full of User Profile related errors, all saying moreorless this:

Exception occured while connecting to WCF endpoint: System.ServiceModel.Security.MessageSecurityException: An unsecured or incorrectly secured fault was received from the other party. See the inner FaultException for the fault code and detail. —> System.ServiceModel.FaultException: An error occurred when verifying security for the message

Spent a while looking through the UPS app config, Profile DB and everything looked normal. The issue is actually a “generic” WCF error - whereby the system clocks on the App Server (1) and WFE server (2) were out of sync by about 6 minutes. Manually setting the clock on the slow one to the current time resolved the issue.

SP2010 and Managed Metadata and &

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:40:18 +0000

I’ve been doing some work with dynamically populating a Managed Metadata term store using the API and data stored in a list.

The code was quite simple - check to see if a term existed, and if not, add it. The first pass of this routine would work fine, but then the second pass would crap out with an issue:

There is already a term with the same default label and parent term.

After a bit of debugging, I figured out it was falling over on a term that contained an & (ampersand) in the name. After a further bit of debugging (converting the character to HEX) it became apparent that it’s storing it as the wide (*pretty) rendition of the ampersand. And after some further research, it would appear that this is by design!

SharePoint 2010 + DocumentSets + OfficialFile.asmx max file size

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:52:18 +0000

Tripped over this issue today. This post explains exactly what’s going on - namely that when using the OfficialFile web service (for e.g., records management), the 50mb upload file size is in place, irrespective of any setting the Web Application General Settings.

Fix:

Make sure that you have set the max file size on the web application
Central Admin –> Manage Web Applications –> Select the Web Application –> General Settings –> Maximum Upload Size

Open the following file and edit on each SharePoint server:
C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions14ISAPIweb.config
Add the following section, then save and close
<system.web> </system.web>

Didn’t even need to recycle the web services website/app pool. Perfect!

Current user is not a farm administrator - redux

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:20:18 +0000

A while ago, I posted about an issue with deploying a custom SharePoint retention policy where activating a feature was failing due to a permissions issue.

I fell over this issue again recently, but despite following all the advice in that post, I still couldn’t get things to activate and I didn’t really want to start giving all known service accounts local admin and DBO on everything in sight. So instead, I used a quick Powershell workaround. This works because PS always runs in the context of the Farm Admin, so I assumed it must have the relevant permissions. This script will find the feature you want to activate, and then activate it. Success is no message returned!

The OLE DB provider Microsoft.Ace.OLEDB.12.0 for linked server (null) reported an error. Access denied.

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:11:01 +0000

I’m noting this here primarily because I’m almost certain to trip over this again in the future. If you want to use the ACE or JET providers to read an e.g., Excel spreadsheet to an e.g., SQL Server table, then something like this is possible. Assuming you had a simple Excel workbook (Book1.xlsx) and in Sheet1 you had

Col1 Col2
Test Test2

You could use this to load it:

SELECT * INTO #tmpTable FROM OPENROWSET('Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0','Excel 12.0 Xml;HDR=YES;Database=C:TempBook1.xlsx','SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]') GO SELECT * from #tmpTable 

Auto generate SQL audit tables and database triggers

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 15:56:48 +0000

One approach to monitoring version history of items in SQL tables is to use an _Audit table version with database triggers. However, the creation and maintenance of the tables and triggers can be time consuming. This post provided a nice script to automate the creation but unfortunately it suffered a few issues. In the comments, someone posted a sproc version of the script - but unfortunately this was also broken.

So I have tidied it up and fixed the issues. My host doesn’t let me post SQL in these posts, so you can view the file here.

SharePoint Designer 2010 - list/library There are no items to show in this view - ListData.svc woes

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:38:38 +0000

This is one of those SharePoint errors. You know the ones.

Background

I was trying to use SharePoint Designer to customise a list. I opened up SharePoint Designer, and, although I could connect to the site itself, when clicking on the lists/libraries folder, you get a message saying:

“There are no items to show in this view”.

Weird. I tried this on various other web applications (even on the same server) and everything was working fine.

SharePoint 2010 - Managed Metadata - Required feature is not enabled for this column type

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 19:17:23 +0000

Quick tip: if you’re using the Managed Metadata service in SharePoint 2010, you may encounter an issue when trying to use it in a site column. When creating the column of type, Managed Metadata, you may encounter the error message:

Required feature is not enabled for this column type

This is simple to fix. In powershell, issue

get-spfeature | where {$_.DisplayName -eq 'TaxonomyFieldAdded'} | enable-spfeature -url http://yoursiteurl

changing the -url paramater to match the URL of your site. Job done.

SharePoint 2010 State Machine workflow delayActivity tip

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:59:06 +0000

If you’re using a delayActivity in your Visual Studio State Machine workflow, you are likely to want to use the InitializeTimeoutDuration handler to set the length of the delay.

An easy mistake to make is to think you could do the following:

private void DelayActivity_InitializeTimeoutDuration(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            delayActivity1.TimeoutDuration = new TimeSpan(0, 10, 0);
        }

However, this won’t work. This is because SharePoint will intialise a new instance of the delayActivity with the timeoutduration specified as default. To set the TimeoutDuration of your “actual” activity, you should do the following:

SharePoint 2010 State Machine workflow onWorkflowItemChanged firing multiple times

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:53:15 +0000

If you’re designing a SharePoint 2010 workflow, particularly a state machine, you may base the workflow activities around an item in a list. Particularly, you may want the workflow to carry out activities when the item is changed by the end user.

This is a relatively straight-forward task, but one thing you will quickly encounter is that if you have multiple states, and each one handling the onWorkflowItemChanged event, you’ll notice that the event will fire once for each occurrence of your handler. So if you had 3 states, and each one has an onWorkflowItemChanged event, then your state that is handling the event will receive it 3 times. This is clearly undesirable and quite frankly strange behaviour.

Get SPUser from Person or Group field

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:00:40 +0000

On any list, you can define a new column as a type of “Person or Group”. In event handlers or workflow, you may want to grab this value as use it as a real SPUser object, which will expose the name and email address, for example. Unfortunately if you just grab the value of the field, e.g.,

 item["MyPersonField"] 

you’ll end up with a string that looks a bit like this:

15;#DOMAIN\Matt Thornton

SharePoint 2010 State Machine delay activity (and why it may not fire)

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 21:44:35 +0000

A common problem in designing workflows is how to make the workflow “sleep” for a period whilst users do (or don’t do) something. A common scenario is where you wait for some user input, but if you don’t get any by a certain time to continue the workflow in a different stream. You achieve this with a delay activity where you specify a timeout in the form of a Timespan.

The delay activity was broken in SP2007 which was then fixed with a Hotfix. Surprisingly, this remains kind of broken in SP2010 as well. That is to say, the delay activity never wakes up.

Activity onWorkflowItemChanged validation warning: The correlation token may be uninitialized

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 13:45:34 +0000

Update: the below information is useful reference, but you may find it leads to undesirable results, where your workflowItem events fire repeatedly. Read the below, and then read this.

Working in Visual Studio 2010 and designing SharePoint 2010 state machine and sequential workflows, you may come across the following warning message when building and deploying your solution when using the onWorkflowItemChanged event:

Activity ‘onWorkflowItemChanged’ validation warning: The correlation token may be uninitialized

You will also probably notice that your workflow doesn’t respond or wake up to any onWorkflowItemChanged events. This is almost certainly due to the correlation token you’re using. The way to get this working correctly is:

Error occurred in deployment step Activate Features: Invalid file name

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 16:29:35 +0000

This is one of those “d’oh” SharePoint moments. Created a new SharePoint feature and used Visual Studio to deploy it. Worked like a dream. Great, I think, ready for UAT. Package up the solution, install to the UAT environment and then attempt to activate the feature. Boom.

Weird. The feature was very simple so the error, as is the wont of SharePoint, was a bit unhelpful. Quick bit of Googling which didn’t help, before, thankfully, my brain engaged. I checked to see if what my feature was trying to do - create a site column and attach it to a couple of content types - had actually worked. It had.

Error occurred in deployment step Activate Features: This functionality is unavailable for field collections not associated with a list.

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 15:40:46 +0000

This follows on from some of my other posts about deploying fields and content types programmatically. In this case, I was simply trying to add a choice field (SPFieldChoice) to a site, and then add it to some content types.

So I had something like:

var myCt = // snip - code to get my existing content type;

// create the choice column
                var fieldChoices = new StringCollection() { "choice1", "choice2", "choice3" };
                var docSourceField = web.Fields.Add("MyChoiceColumn", SPFieldType.Choice, false, false, fieldChoices);

                // get the column we just created 
                SPFieldChoice docSourceChoiceField = (SPFieldChoice)web.Fields[DocumentSourceColumnName];

                if (null == docSourceChoiceField)
                {
                    throw new Exception("Error: Couldn't get the docSourceChoiceField.");
                }
                                // add the new field to my content type
                myCt.Fields.Add(docSourceChoiceField);
                myCt.Update(true);

However, running this fell over with the error:

SharePoint Event Receivers + Inherited Documents + ItemUpdating

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 10:27:49 +0000

A while back I posted some info about using Event Receivers in SharePoint 2010 and a workaround to item values being null. Today, I needed to do something much more basic, and during an ItemUpdating event set the value of a column. I wrote the code that I knew would work - but, of course, it simply wouldn’t work. I did a spot of Googling about, and found the chaps at Tango Technology who had written a very simple solution to it. But - it wouldn’t work for me. I knew the event was firing - but no matter what I did, the new value just wouldn’t “take”.

SharePoint 2010 upgrade failure - Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:02:49 +0000

I’m not a SharePoint administrator, but from time to time you have to get involved. I needed to migrate some data between farms but in order to do a backup / restore of e.g., Site Collections, version numbers have to be in range. Although the source server was reporting the version was OK, in Central Admin, it was saying that an upgrade was required. This is usually achieved by running the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard.

Quick tip: Access Denied when editing navigation (areanavigationsettings.aspx) in MySites

Thu, 03 May 2012 20:03:27 +0000

If you encounter an issue, specifically in MySites, where you get an Access Denied error trying to edit the navigation, check whether you have the publishing feature enabled. I had this same issue when “Enterprise features” were re-enabled at the Central Admin, which for some reason enabled that on the My Site host, which isn’t needed.

Error activating features - key cannot be null - redux

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:10:57 +0000

A while ago, I posted about a problem deploying declarative XML content types and fields.

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Activate Features’: Key cannot be null. Parameter name: Key

I’ve just encountered the same error - but this time with a field being deployed programmatically - i.e., no XML at all. I was deploying a Managed Metadata field (TaxonomyField) and doing this:

TaxonomyField taxField = web.Fields.CreateNewField("TaxonomyFieldType", "My Field") as TaxonomyField;
taxField.SspId = termStore.Id;
...snip...
taxField.Update();
web.Fields.Add(taxField);

This seemed pretty reasonable - except for the error, of course. In this case it was caused by taxField.Update() - this is not required - the field doesn’t actually exist at this point.

SharePoint 2010 + Custom retention formula installation failure + current user is not a farm administrator

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:06:19 +0000

You may encounter this issue when trying to deploy a Custom Expiration Formula for use as part of records management within SharePoint 2010. The error you may encounter is:

The SPPersistedObject, PolicyConfigService Name=PolicyConfigService, could not be updated because the current user is not a Farm Administrator.

This is a really nasty little error and it may be easy to miss as people have a tendency to use an empty try catch {} in their FeatureActivation so the feature activates but you’re not aware there is a problem. (Well, you become aware of it when for all the activation in the world, the “Use Custom Retention Formula” dropdown never changes from disabled.) It’s particularly annoying because you’re activating a feature at the Site Collection level - why would you need Farm Admin to do it? Well, it’s because it makes changes to the Content Service (or thereabouts) - and this is proven when you go to Central Admin > Security > Configure Information Policy Management > Retention and you’ll notice (after a successful activation) that your custom policy shows up in the “Resources” section.

SharePoint 2010 + Search within document sets

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:15:43 +0000

I could play a game of “state the obvious” and say that SharePoint 2010 search is powerful. It’s really an incredible beast - and that’s even without any FAST goodies in there. But something that isn’t obviously supported OOTB but seems there’s a few people out there trying to do - search within folders, or in my case, Document Sets. SharePoint search was already configured and, actually, I could search within document sets, by doing a site wide search and then using the refinement panel (on the left hand side of a search result page in a search center) to narrow it down to my document set. What I wanted to do was perform this search directly from a search box.

As you use the refinement panel, you’ll notice that the URL changes, as you stack up the filters, and as it happens, that’s all that’s required is a properly crafted URL:

 http://yoursite/_layouts/OssSearchResults.aspx?k=[searchterms] site:"http://yoursite/yourlibrary/yourdocset"

Note the highlighted part - you can restrict your search results to a specified document set (or folder) by supplying the URL in to the site: refinement option/filter.

With that bit taken care of, the challenge was to get a searchbox that would do this dynamically - i.e., craft the URL properly to apply the filter and direct through to the search results page properly. It’s possible using a standard search box and the trusty old Content Editor.

SharePoint Event Receivers + ItemAdded + Null Columns fun

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 18:24:06 +0000

Event receivers enable you to run some action when a particular event occurs. For example, every time a new item is added to a list, you may want to run some code, or start a workflow. This is really handy - but be aware of some gotchas. SharePoint event receivers will generally be one of two types - an “-ing” event or an “-ed” event, such as ItemAdding or ItemAdded. As their name suggests, an -ing event runs whilst the the event is happening (and might therefore give you the option to cancel it) and -ed events occur after the event has occurred. You need to be aware of how these events run. Generally, the -ing events run synchronously, that is, they are blocking and run in the same thread/cycle that they were generated in, and -ed events run asynchronously, meaning the opposite - they are not blocking - they will be run in a separate thread and not block the execution of the main thread. You therefore need to be aware of what info may, or may not, be available to you when you run code in an event receiver.

Web Service access + internal traffic + 407 Proxy Authentication Required

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:35:11 +0000

This had me stumped for a while. I was developing a SharePoint-based client to consume a simple web service. I started by writing a console app version of the code before deploying to SharePoint. Fairly straight-forward - added a web reference to my VS2010 project, and used

MyWebService srv = new MyWebService();
srv.DoSomething();

Early on in the project, I didn’t give much to the fact that when calling the method on the web service, I was given a 407 Proxy Authentication Error. I just setup a simple proxy for it:

Creating SharePoint 2010 Content Organizer Rules programmatically

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:43:01 +0000

The Content Organizer (gah! Organiser!) in SharePoint 2010 is a nifty new feature that enables documents to be added to a single library (the “Drop Off Library”) and then let SharePoint route them through to the correct final resting position based on a set of configured rules. Rules can be configured per content type and allow conditions to be set based on metadata on the item. You can even use it to send documents - and document sets - between site collections, e.g., to a Records Center. Very cool.

Depending on your requirements, you may find you need to create a lot of rules which as with most things SharePoint can be cumbersome if you need to do it all through the UI. Fortunately, creating the rules programmatically is straight-forward.

Quick tip: SharePoint powershell - get items in a list based on custom columns and other hints

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:35:49 +0000

This may be handy when trying to find specific items in a list based on values of various fields:

$web = Get-SPWeb http://yourweb
$list = $web.Lists["Your Library Name"]

// this is the bit - get items of a particular content type
// ? is shorthand for where, and $_ is the item in the pipeline
$listItems = $list.Items | ?{$_.ContentType.Name -eq "Content Type Name"}

// or items based on a custom column - if using -like then the wildcard is *
$listItems = $list.Items | ?{$_["InternalFieldName"] -like "*this*"

// you could join them up using -and
$listItems = $list.Items | ?{$_.ContentType.Name -eq "Content Type Name" -and $_["InternalFieldName"] -like "*this*"

// or iterate the loop and print them out
foreach($item in $listItems) { Write-Host $item.Name, $item["InternalFieldName"] }

or more directly

$list.Items | ?{$_.ContentType.Name -eq "Content Type Name" -and $_["InternalFieldName"] -like "*this*" | foreach { $_.Name, $_["InternalFieldName"]

// or count them
$listItems.Count

or

$list.Items | ?{$_.ContentType.Name -eq "Content Type Name" -and $_["InternalFieldName"] -like "*this*" | foreach {$count++}
$count

Powershell can be infuriating - but when you find the syntax, it can be pretty helpful.

SSRS error: Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:27:50 +0000

If you’re using SSRS in SharePoint integrated mode, you may come across this error when using report parameters that have a high number of items in them. A recent security bulletin highlighted some issues and vulnerabilities in ASP.net, and a patch was released to cover some of the items. One of these was the maximum number of items you can have in a collection. If you exceed the limit, then you’ll likely get an error like:

SharePoint 2010 Foundation + SQL Server Reporting Services Integrated mode installation issues: Failed to establish connection with report server, 401 errors and more

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:50:28 +0000

You may be trying to set up SharePoint 2010 to act as the report repository for SQL Server Reporting Services report. This is a pretty nifty feature, especially as it’s available in the Foundation (i.e., Free) version of SharePoint. There is a pretty exhaustive guide on how to set it up and for extra help, this blog post is pretty good too, and if you follow the steps, you get pretty far. However, if you’re in a multiple server setup (i.e. your SQL server isn’t on the same server as your Central Admin) you will likely encounter configuration issues surrounding authentication, and there is a great deal of confusion about what it all means - especially when it comes down to Kerberos. That’s beyond the scope of this post - what I’m covering here is one very annoying issue that there was no definitive answer to on the web.

Assuming you get all the server parts setup and Reporting Services configured, you might find that you can browse to your report server address on the machine hosting reporting services, but, if you try to browse to that address from anywhere else, you’ll get an endless stream of login boxes, and no credentials will work. Also, if you go to Central Admin and go to General Application Settings > Reporting Services Integration, when you fill in the details to connect to reporting services, you’ll hit an error like:

Failed to establish connection with report server. Verify the server URL is correct or review ULS logs for more information. Product area: SQL Server Reporting Services, Category: Configuration Pages

and, in the ULS logs, an error like:

SQL Server Reporting Services Configuration Pages Failed to retrieve RS configuration information: System.Net.WebException: The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.

Here’s ~~how I fixed it~~ my workaround.

The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:37:58 +0000

Another example of “when SharePoint goes wrong.” On a dev machine, the search service mysteriously stopped working. I can’t pinpoint what caused it, but SP1 and a CU were recently applied and these seem like good candidates for breaking things. When trying to admin the search service, you would see the following error:

The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component ’{guid}′ in search application ‘Search Service Application’ is in a good state and try again.

…and trying to modify the topology of the search, resulted in a spurious error:

An unhandled exception occurred in the user interface.Exception Information: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

Something was clearly unhappy. Rather than waste too much time, the simplest solution seemed to be to delete the search application and recreate it, which I duly did, via Central Admin, verified that DBs and application pools disappeared and recreated the search application, using new names and credentials. Same error. I ~~wasted~~ spent some looking at permissions and the usual array of logs, events and other candidates, ran PSConfig and other upgrades, all to no avail.

I figured I could create the search application via Powershell. Why should this make a difference? No idea, but worth a shot. Then thankfully, I found that someone had already done it for me. And yes, this resolved the issues. I can’t explain why seeing as this script shouldn’t do anything that the GUI doesn’t do.

Script:

Error formatting query, probably invalid parameters [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 22050)

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:28:55 +0000

I just tripped over this problem, and despite a fair amount of Googlage, I didn’t find anything that directly resolved my issue. I was trying to use dbMail in SQL Server 2008 to send an email on a schedule which included the results of a query. Doing this should be fairly straightforward, by executing the sp_send_dbmail stored procedure, which is in MSDB:

This query works fine in SSMS, but when run as a SQL Server Agent Job, it fails, with the error

Useful SharePoint script to restart SharePoint services and IIS

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:40:36 +0000

A SharePoint developer’s life is filled with many things, but one of the most common is the old faithful iisreset, coupled with a reset of the Timer Service and the Admin Service. When you’re working on timer jobs, it can get tedious quickly to have to keep resetting things.

So I’m sharing a useful batch script I knocked together to do it for you. It will perform three functions - restart the SharePoint 2010 Timer Service, the SharePoint 2010 Administration Service and do an IISReset. It will prompt you if you want to do each of them, and if you don’t reply within 5 seconds automatically do it.

Configuring certificates and trust in SharePoint 2010 for accessing Exchange Web Services

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:38:22 +0000

Exchange is built on web services and as I posted about a while about accessing EWS from SharePoint can be pretty neat. There is a managed API to make your life even easier. However, one issue you may come across is actually getting SharePoint and Exchange to talk nicely to each other. This will walk you through some of the steps required to get things going.

SharePoint 2010: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:25:33 +0000

This is a peculiar little bug. When creating a List Definition, you may encounter the following error when you try to deploy:

The filename, directory name or volume label syntax is incorrect.

It took a while to track the cause, seeing as a lot of info out there info out there relates to things to do with file systems, which in this case, obviously wasn’t the cause.

The bug for me was that I had created a List Definition and called it My.List.Definition - notice the multiple periods. I wanted it to match the namespaces that we were using. It turns out that the second period trips it up. When you create a List Definition with multiple periods, the List Definition only gets the first period, e.g., My.List, whereas the Elements.xml file for the List Definition still references My.List.Definition - hence it can’t deploy properly.

Famous. Again.

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:51:51 +0000

Ahh, the pressures of being a cricketing supergod. Perhaps not.

But still, it’s always nice to get written up in the paper. ESPECIALLY when they get your name right. (Third time lucky.)

Matt on BBC website

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:10:28 +0000

OK, so it’s nothing major, but I got a small mention on the sport section of the BBC website, as part of its coverage of the Channel Islands Cup, in which I am playing, for PKF Wanderers.

The standard of cricket we play in Guernsey is very good and it’s right that the BBC monitor the CI Cup. Wanderers this year have an excellent chance of winning it, and it would be a fantastic achievement to do so. The semi-final last week was washed out, so we’ll try again this weekend. We’re strong favourites to win, which will most likely set up a final with arch-rivals (and Guernsey-based) Cobo who are unbeaten in all forms of cricket this season.

Matt's travel blog is a go

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:23:52 +0000

Well, hello. And, of course, welcome. Thanks for stopping by. I don’t know who you are, or why you happen to be looking at my wee spot ‘o’ t’Interweb, but nevertheless, thanks for being here. And for being you. Because without you, none of this would be possible. Fortunately, you *are* you, and this *is* possible, which is where we find ourselves, around about now.

What this is though, perhaps requires some definition. Alternatively it’s painfully obvious: it’s my travel blog. The _we_blog I am keeping, or, at least, endeavouring, to keep, whilst I am away travelling.