It has been a while since I did some blogs, so time to get going again. What better way to start than with a PerformancePoint one, right? This is a post that I have been meaning to do, particularly after I responded to a post about it in the PPS M & A forums here – PerformancePoint Filter – Save as default permissions. I had come across this particular issue at a few client sites as well. The ‘Save as my defaults’ option for filters was a new capability that was added with SharePoint 2010 SP1 and I posted a blog on the new features added to PerformancePoint with SP1 here PerformancePoint 2010 Cascading & Apply Filters – SP1 Features.
So, for those of you not familiar with the ‘Save as my defaults’ option here is what it looks like:
And it is part of the Apply Filters settings in the ‘Save options’ towards the bottom, you can either show or hide the check box to save the filter choices.
First off, the Apply Filters button allows users to make changes to the filters without the changes immediately refreshing the content they are connected to (similar to the View Report or Apply button for Reporting Services reports).
The ‘Save as my defaults’ check box pretty much does as it says, a user can make a selection, check the box, and then click the Apply Filters button. This when then store the parameters for this particular dashboard page so that when the user returns to this page the selections will be restored. So even if the user makes different selections from the list, PerformancePoint will remember the values that were saved when the check box was enabled.
In the image below I make the selections ‘Accessories’ and ‘North Amer’ and check the box to save the defaults.
I then click the Apply Filters button and the dashboard items refresh and you will notice that the check box is disabled.
If I make a change to the geography filter and select Europe and click Apply Filters the dashboard items connected to the filters will refresh.
Now if I refresh the entire page (click F5) I see that my original filters that I selected and applied when using the ‘Save as my defaults’ check box are restored.
So this is pretty cool, but how does this work for a typical user that has view-only permissions to the dashboard.
Well, it doesn’t because the option to ‘Save as my defaults’ is disabled. Hmmm… well that doesn’t help. So what is the secret SharePoint permission that needs to be added so that this is enabled without making the user a dashboard admin? Good question. Well I wasn’t able to find any documentation on this and even when these new features came out there wasn’t that much documentation. Basically after a little trial-and-error (or guessing-and-testing) I came across the additional permission that is needed. The permission that is needed is in the Personal Permissions section and is ‘Update Personal Web Parts – Update Web Parts to display personalized information.’
Once that is added then the check box is enabled for the user and can be used.
Pretty simple.
NOTE: one thing I noticed with this, and I would say that it is a bug in my opinion (don’t believe this has been fixed in a CU), is that if the same filters are used on other pages and changed and you come back to the original page where you used the Apply Filters and ‘Save as my defaults’ option, the values will be overridden based on the selections on the other page. The original defaults will not be used, so seems to be a scoping thing in my opinion as to how the filter values are saved, not working as I would expect, they are saved at the filter level versus the page. So the defaults can actually be wiped out if the same filters are used on other pages without the Apply Filters button. If the Apply Filters button is used on all pages then it appears you are okay.
From time-to-time when I am building out a new dashboard with PerformancePoint Services 2010 I will all of a sudden get an unexpected error when I try to create an Analytical Report. When I create the report and add a measure to the report I simply get the error message “An unexpected error occurred. Error 11861.”
An unexpected error occurred. Error 11861. Additional details have been logged for your administrator.
Contact the administrator for more details.
When I try to add items to the report I keep getting a message stating “This data source cannot be used because PerformancePoint Services is not configured correctly. Additional details have been logged for your administrator.”
That is a funny message. Kind of scary as well. Is my PerformancePoint broken? Oh no! Help! What did someone do to the service? Wait a second, I just got done setting up KPIs with no problems. What is going on?
Well the issue is that you have created a data connection that is currently not published (saved) to the server. KPIs don’t have any issues with this, but the Analytical Reports do. You will notice other odd things during your PerformancePoint development like this where these two items behave a bit differently.
So if we take a look in the Workspace Browser we will see the pencil on the data source icon in the data connections. This means that it has been modified and is basically in edit mode. This could also be the case if it was already saved (published) to the server, but in this case I have not performed an initial save.
So if we select the data connection and click the Save icon in the Quick Access Toolbar or do a right-click and select Save then the data connection will end up looking like this:
Now if we go back to our Analytical Report we were creating we will see the following message:
Drag measures, dimensions, or named sets to Rows and Columns to lay out the report.
Now the designer is happy and we can build out the report and add items to the rows, columns, background, etc.
So if you get this message don’t be alarmed and go running off to your SharePoint Farm Administrator, simply take a look at your Workspace Browser and see if you have a connection that needs to be published.
Today I was browsing through the SharePoint 2010 general forums to see if there were any unanswered PerformancePoint questions and found one about PerformancePoint 2010 tutorial. I replied linking back to Free Online PerformancePoint Services 2010 Training Videos and then someone later posted a reference to a new Microsoft Virtual Lab that I had not seen before MSDN Virtual Lab: Developing Business Intelligence Applications (filed under Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). The description of this new lab (and it must have been posted this month based on the lab manual screen shots because the MonthToDate TI forumla returns November 2003 in the PerformancePoint lab) is the following:
After completing this lab, you will be better able to use the Chart Web Part to create graphical representations of data within SharePoint lists, use Microsoft Excel 2010 to examine and data from SQL Server Analysis Services, and publish an Excel workbook with Excel Services to make it accessible to users using a browser. You will also be able to work with a PerformancePoint Services site and the new Dashboard Designer.
I went ahead and printed out the manual and went through the lab with about 15 minutes to spare on the end (server was a bit unresponsive at times – and you get 90 minutes to complete the lab). I have not used the Chart Web Part before, so that was something new (I stick with PerformancePoint, Reporting Services, Excel Services, etc.) and the Excel Services portion wasn’t too bad (got to add a sparkline). The Chart Web Part does provide 3D and Tooltips, something that Excel Services doesn’t provide though…interesting. The PerformancePoint KPI setup was a good exercise using the Time Intelligence portion of PerformancePoint as well. All-in-all I would give the lab maybe a 7 out of 10. There were a couple of minor typo issues in the manual on pages 28 and 41 from what I saw (one stating to map to 2009 and then tells you to type 2010 and the other saying to ‘mote’ to a URL), but overall it was very straight forward.
Definitely nice to have these available and provide you the ability to test drive the technology and get exposure to these items. And of course it is FREE training opportunity that you can do on your own time. So what are you waiting for, get over there and check it out.
So you created some cool dashboards with PerformancePoint Services 2010 with SharePoint 2010 and now you want to deploy them to a new environment (server). How do you do this? Well with PerformancePoint 2007 there were a couple of options, you could save your work to a workspace file, connect to new environment, and then publish everything. The other option was to use the BI Report Automation Publisher tool available on CodePlex. With the tool you were able to reference a workspace file as well, reference certain items, and make appropriate adjustments for server references. Both were easy options and straight forward for the most part.
Now with the 2010 version this has changed. I will have to admit that at first I got thrown for a loop and was confused myself since I wasn’t able to simply use the new workspace file, connect to new server, and save the content. I even tried modifying the file and making environment URL reference changes to try and get the 2007 deployment option to work. Needless to say I initially started to recreate items in the new environments from scratch and I guess I was not the only one. I ended up posting an item in the forums – Deploy PPS 2010 dashboard content to new server – to seek some advice and Umair Khan pointed me in the right direction and refreshed my memory.
In PerformancePoint Services 2010 we need to start out by opening up Dashboard Designer and connecting to the new environment.
Click on the Import Items button in the Home Ribbon of Dashboard Designer and select your workspace file (this will be the file from your other environment that contains the content that you want to migrate and move to the new server).
Now you will walk through a wizard to select the content that you want to import to the new server (environment).
In this case I am going to do both items and I only have one location for each on my new server that I am moving the content to.
The items will now be imported and saved to the specified locations and you will receive a results page.
You can then add the items to the workspace and start to make the necessary changes.
This is similar to the 2007 way where you have to make all of the necessary changes after the fact when you simply connect and publish the items from an existing workspace file. It would be nice if there were some options to make some changes to the connections or report file references, but it does move the content.
For some more information on this check out the online content here – Import PerformancePoint Dashboard 2010 content from a SharePoint Server 2010 server, site, or list.
Back in September there was a forum posting that was looking for a solution to resolving the filtering issue with Analytical Grids in PerformancePoint – filter value function not working on analytic grid. The filtering functionality was working fine with Analytical Charts, but for Grids there seemed to be a slight bug. When the Top filter was applied to an Analytical Grid report you would received messages like the following:
There is no data to display.
Drag measures, dimensions, or named sets to Rows and Columns to lay out the report.
there are no data rows to display
So what was going on, because if you switched the Report Type from Grid to say Bar Chart it worked just fine…
If you set this up in a Chart and then flipped back to Grid then it would retain the setting. If you modified the filter at this point then you would get what you see in the first screenshot above.
Well just this month a new Cumulative Update was released for SQL Server 2008 R2 – Cumulative Update 5. It just so happens that one of the fixes in this was related to PerformancePoint Services!
I typically wait until a Service Pack is released, but I always review the fixes that are included in the Cumulative Updates, because you just never know when you might uncover an item that could resolve an issue that you have been having or might not have been aware of.
In order to get this fix you need to request the hotfix from the main page – Cumulative Update package 5 for SQL Server 2008 R2. Once you do this you will get an email with the download link and also a password to unzip the actual hotfix package that you can install.
Here are some screenshots of the installation process which took approximately 10 minutes to install on my machine:
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Once you get this installed you will be on SQL Server 2008 R2 version number 10.50.1753.0. After I performed the install it did require a reboot in my situation.
Now we go back and test out our filter functionality on the Analytical Grid and the results are…
Well we didn’t get an error like the one in the first screenshot, but it doesn’t apply the filter properly like it does if we switch over to an Analytical Chart:
It appears that they fixed part of the issue, but it is still not handling the user defined hierarchy filtering. If we use just a attribute hierarchy then it works just fine.
So at this point it will take a little more investigation and a follow-up reply to the original forum posting.
