Monthly Archives: May 2011

PerformancePoint and Error 33494

One of my clients called today when their PerformancePoint environment (in SharePoint 2010) broke down. One of the app servers in the farm was running low on disk space. While addressing that, the client uninstalled “too much” and the PP stuff all stopped functioning. Various web parts would show “An unexpected error occurred. Error 33494. Additional details have been logged for your administrator”:

I looked up the error and didn’t find anything specific to “Error 33494” but this MSDN forums posting was helpful: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/sharepoint2010setup/thread/E1FE189D-7F89-455D-A98B-C1A12D8626AB

I found ADOMD.NET here as a component in the SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=228DE03F-3B5A-428A-923F-58A033D316E1&displaylang=en

(click to enlarge)

I download and installed that and it fixed everything.

I think this is a pretty oddball kind of error, but if you hit it, you at least you have an option.

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Lists.asmx, GetListItems and Folders

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I was doing some research for someone today around the list.asmx web service provided as part of SharePoint 2010 (and earlier). She was able to get the list items at the root folder (including the names of sub-folders), but couldn’t get items in sub-folders. I did some looking around on the internets and it’s a surprisingly common question. Yet, I couldn’t get a good answer to the simple question, “if I know the folder, how do I get the items in the folder?” To be honest, I didn’t try all that hard since I’ve wanted to figure this one out on my own for a while Smile .

To set this up, I created a site named “Blogging Scenarios” and a custom list named “Custom List with Sub Folders”. I then created folders named:

Year 2005
Year 2006
Year 2007

I added a few items to the folder “Year 2006”. This is what it looks like:

My friend isn’t writing C# code but rather using Java, so the SOAP envelope was what she really needed. To get that, I wrote a bit of jQuery and then used fiddler to get the actual HTTP conversation.

Here’s the relevant jQuery (I copied the code down below if you want to copy/paste):

They first key is to include both a <queryOptions> and <QueryOptions> node. The second key is that the <Folder> node is a URL to which the client has access.

There may be other ways to get this, but this worked well for me when using jQuery.

Here is the SOAP envelope for the above:

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv=’http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/’>
<soapenv:Body>
    <GetListItems xmlns=’http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/’>
      <listName>Custom List with Sub Folders</listName>
      <viewFields>
        <ViewFields>
          <FieldRef Name=’Title’ />
          <FieldRef Name=’EncodedAbsUrl’ />
        </ViewFields>
      </viewFields>
      <queryOptions>
        <QueryOptions>
          <Folder>http://demoserver1/Blogging Scenarios/lists/Custom List with Sub Folders/Year 2006</Folder>
        </QueryOptions>
      </queryOptions>
    </GetListItems>
</soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>

A lot of examples and discussion around this led me to believe that all I need was <QueryOptions> and specify a folder name. For me, I need to both wrap it inside <queryOptions> as well as specify a fully qualified URL for the <Folder> node.

Here’s the jQuery AJAX setup:

$(document).ready(function() {
       var soapEnv =
           "<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv=’http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/’> \
               <soapenv:Body> \
                    <GetListItems xmlns=’http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/’> \
                       <listName>Custom List with Sub Folders</listName> \
                       <viewFields> \
                           <ViewFields> \
                              <FieldRef Name=’Title’ /> \
                              <FieldRef Name=’EncodedAbsUrl’ /> \
                          </ViewFields> \
                       </viewFields> \
                       <queryOptions> \
                         <QueryOptions> \
                           <Folder>http://demoserver1/Blogging Scenarios/lists/Custom List with Sub Folders/Year 2006</Folder> \
                         </QueryOptions> \
                       </queryOptions> \
                   </GetListItems> \
               </soapenv:Body> \
           </soapenv:Envelope>";

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SPD Workflow Patterns, Tips and Tricks

Lists.asmx, GetList and “Value cannot be null”

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I discovered today that the GetList() method in lists.asmx web service has to be called very carefully or it’s prone to throw a mysterious “Value cannot be null” exception (and that’s assuming you can get past the even worse generic error message, “Exception of type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException’ was thrown.”) Specifically, I found that you can’t provide any kind of prefix on the GetList method. The following jQuery snippet illustrates the point:

If you do that, the web service responds with “Value cannot be null” as per this fiddler-provided HTTP transcript:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope
     xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
     xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
     xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

<soap:Body>
    <soap:Fault>
      <faultcode>soap:Server</faultcode>
      <faultstring>
        Exception of type ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException’ was thrown.
      </faultstring>
      <detail>
        <errorstring xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/">
Value cannot be null.
        </errorstring>
      </detail>
    </soap:Fault>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Of course, you probably wouldn’t add that “s0” prefix on your own, but some tools are prone to do it (like Eclipse).

This is all the more confusing / frustrating because other methods tolerate prefixes. For instance, the GetListCollection method doesn’t mind if it’s been prefixed, even with nonsense prefixes like “xyzzy”:

This “value cannot be null” seems fairly common with lists.asmx so hopefully this will help someone out in future.

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Backup/Restore and Disabled Managed Metadata Column

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One of my projects right now makes extensive use of managed metadata columns.

There are several people working and developing on the project and one of them has created a lot of (sweet) test data. I wanted some of that action, so he took a backup and I restored it into my environment. That had the sad effect of disabling all of my managed metadata site columns on any editform.aspx or publishing page or really, anywhere, as shown:

The restored data showed the values, but they were not editable. Interestingly, all of the code I was writing was able to query those fields fine. I just couldn’t edit any of them. I couldn’t even edit those columns on entirely new pages/list items. I could not find any errors in the log files.

I played around with it for longer than I like to admit until somewhere along the idea I got the idea to update the site column in the web UI. My thought was that maybe the backup/restore process broke some connections between the MMS service and the site columns. That did, in fact, solve it. It’s a pain because you have first select the right term group and second, fix it everywhere it’s used. In my case, it’s worth the effort to get that sweet, sweet test data.

It does beg the question – how do you keep a test environment in good shape that’s a backup of production? I think that’s my root cause here and it’s a kind of normal thing for people to create a test environment as a backup of production… Questions, questions..

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Endlessly Nesting <div> Tags and jQuery

Quick Fix: “The content type name ‘$Resources:ReportServerResources … cannot contain … special characters”

4 Replies

I’ve been spending some time cleaning up a SharePoint 2010 site and one of the cleanup issues relates to a corrupt / incorrectly installed SQL Server Report Services issue. The issue arose when one of my colleagues tried to save a site as a template and then create create a new site based on that template. The save operation worked fine, but when she tried to create the new site, SharePoint displayed the following error message:

Error

The content type name ‘$Resources:ReportServerResources,DataSourceContentTypeName;’ cannot contain: \ / : * ? “ # % < > { } | ~ & , two consecutive periods (..), or special characters such as a tab.

Here’s a screen cap:

I had a look at the content types in the site and found this:

Those content types are clearly unhealthy.

This issue seems to come up a lot on the Internets and there doesn’t seem to be a single consensus on how to solve it. I found a handy table that mapped the bad content type names to good content type names here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-ZA/sharepoint2010programming/thread/cb03e866-8184-4943-acfe-cafffa1b8b7a. I manually updated them thusly:

(BrightStarr in the name is obviously optional, but it can’t hurt Smile )

This allowed me to create a new template and didn’t break anything on the other sites, including some PerformancePoint Server stuff that a completely different group of people were working on. I was then able to create a new site on the template. Success!

I am not sure this is a 100% solution, but it got me and everyone involved past this annoying error. If I find anything new, I’ll post an update. My nervousness stems from the fact that these names shouldn’t be wrong in the first place and by fixing the display name, I am not touching the internal name.

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One Cause for “The creator of this fault did not specify a Reason.”

Handy Reference: Default Results from KeywordQuery Search

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When you invoke the Execute() method on a KeywordQuery, you can create a ResultTable based on ResultType.RelevantResults. This code snippet illustrates what I mean:

ResultTableCollection resultsTableCollection = myKeywordQuery.Execute();

ResultTable searchResultsTable = resultsTableCollection[ResultType.RelevantResults];

The resulting table will have the following columns of information:

WorkId
Rank
Title
Author
Size
Path
Description
Write
SiteName
CollapsingStatus
HitHighlightedSummary
HitHighlightedProperties
ContentClass
IsDocument
PictureThumbnailURL
ServerRedirectedURL

I derived this list from a SharePoint 2010 environment, enterprise edition. Hopefully it will be handy to someone in future.

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One Reason for: “Failed to extract the cab file in the solution”

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While working on a visual studio web part project today, I did a minor re-org of some files to be put into the _layouts folder as part of the deployment process. Specifically, I renamed a .js file from “TypeAhead.js” to “TypeAhead(old).js” I plan to remove it as soon as its successor “TypeAhead.js” proves correct. It looked like this:

This immediately caused a problem with visual studio when I tried to deploy the project:

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Add Solution’: Failed to extract the cab file in the solution.

It turns out that you should not put a parenthesis in file names. I removed the parens and that solved the problem.

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