Friday, May 11, 2012

SharePoint remote management through Windows Powershell

Hi guys,

Just a quick note on managing SharePoint remotely through the use of Windows Powershell. I just wanted to blog this for my own use, but thought that someone else might find it handy. The following blog is a very nice description of how to setup and use remote management through Windows Powershell.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/opal/archive/2010/03/07/sharepoint-2010-with-windows-powershell-remoting-step-by-step.aspx

Thanks,

Hermann

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

SSRS Parameters Greyed Out, SSRS 'Back Button' Issue

Hi guys,

I have been doing quite a bit of development on SSRS lately and I ran into quite an annoying bug which I still haven't been able to fix (although I have found a workaround). The bug that I am talking about is one that many people have come across when using the ReportViewer web part in SharePoint in order to display a SSRS Report in a SharePoint page.

Let me give a quick description:

When I am viewing Report A and this report has a link that links to Report B, I click on the link and then, as expected I am taken to Report B. Now if I want to go back the parent report, I can use the 'Back to Parent Report' button which is provided at the top of the ReportViewer web part. However, this button does not work correctly. When the button is clicked, the parameter list is not refreshed and so you get taken back to the parent report while your parameters are still those of the child report. I have also found that once I'm back on the parent report, with the wrong parameters displaying, links to other reports cease to work.

I don't have a lot of time now, so I will just cut right to the chase and say that here I will not provide a solution to the problem but simply a workaround.

What I did was to implement my own back button. I simply passed the parent report's parameters down to the child report. I obviously specified these parameters to be hidden on the child report. I then created a text box on the child report and implemented an action on the textbox. This action then takes me back to the parent report and passes the parent's parameters back to it in order for it to have the correct parameters now. Then in the ReportViewer web part, I simply hid the back button.

Too dirty for my liking, but it gets the job done. (I tried many other workarounds as well; I also installed SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1, which according to MS, should have worked, but didn't).

The other thing that I want to mention real quick is the issue of parameters acting kind of strange sometimes. In this particular case, parameters were greyed out for no reason. The parameters before it had values chosen.

Please make sure that the data set that you are getting the values from for the parameter, does not contain any NULL values as this will cause a greyed-out parameter if you use the data set to set the default values as well.

Thanks,

Happy coding!

Hermann