PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer installation URL

I just want to write this down quickly and I hope that some time this can help someone out looking for some real quick information. If you have Windows Server 2008 running on some machine (and you have Sharepoint Enterprise running with some site set up) and you are looking to install or run PPS Dashboard Designer, the easiest way is to go to the url http://<<yoursite>>/Pages/ppssample.aspx. From this page you will be able to install or run Dashboard Designer.

Thanks,

Hermann

Google Chrome user agent style sheet overwrites css

If you have used Google Chrome's developer tools quite a bit, you might know that it has a very useful interface  that specifies from where it is getting it's css settings for a specific element. You might stumble across a case where your css is getting overwritten by css from a "user agent style sheet". It seems like Chrome has a default style sheet for webpages; however if you css is getting overwritten, simply check your css syntax. It is most probably a syntax error that is causing Chrome to ignore your css and opt for using its own.

Happy coding,

Hermann

jQuery ajax function returns html code for whole page

I ran into a situation that I hadn't run into before. In my jQuery ajax function the result that was returned was the html code of a whole page. Not to fear, this is an error that should not be too hard to track. In my case, I used servlets and my servlet used the redirect function to redirect to another page after I had used the printwriter to return some html code to the ajax function.

The result was that the redirect function was redirecting to another page after the printwriter had written its result (so the printwriter's result was simply overwritten by the redirect method). Thus the ajax function received the html code of the whole page that the servlet had redirected to.

Check for similar functions (whether you are working in php, Perl, etc.). I have not run into this many times, but it makes sense that any similar case should have almost exactly the same cause.

Happy coding,

Hermann

Measures in PerformancePoint Dashboard filter

You might know how to get dimensions in a filter in PerformancePoint Dashboard filters, but what if you want to change the measures of a report, using a filter?

You can use the MDX Query filter type when creating the filter and then specify [Measures].[Measures].Members as the MDX query to populate the filter.

You can obviously also specify particular members if you do not want all of them.

Thanks,

Hermann

Changing PPS Report measures with filters

Hi guys,

The below link gave me the information that I needed:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ppsmonitoringandanalytics/thread/3d4fd073-4f6c-4ce4-ac1b-7953ceff6fb5/

Thanks,

Hermann

MDX Filter Connection Formula

The Connection Formula setting for PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer is quite useful in many instances. For example, if we want to create a report with the top 10 US states by the revenue generated by employees in that state, then we can build the filter using a dimension hierarchy like Employees by State. The problem is that we cannot simply connect this filter to the chart by connecting it directly to one of the chart dimensions. The reason is that if we select "Arizona" from the hierarchy, the natural result that we would want to see in the chart is for it to show the top 10 Employees for Arizona.

To get the desired result, we somehow have to specify that when we select "Arizona" we want to pass all the Employees in Arizona as a parameter to the report. The report can then do all the filtering on this set which includes only Employees from the desired state.

This is where the Connection Formula property comes in very handy. When creating a connection between a filter and a report, it is possible to specify a Connection Formula so that you can actually specify exactly what custom values you want to pass to the report when this filter is used.

The formula has to be written in MDX where <<SourceValue>> refers to the value in the filter, that is selected by the user.

For instance, in the above mentioned case we can use something like the below MDX query (the syntax might not be exactly right). The query assumes that we are using a Employee by Location hierarchy that contains all the Employees as Children of the state members in the hierarchy.

IIF(<<SourceValue>>.Member_Name = 'Arizona', [Hierarchy].[Arizona].Children, "whatever else you want to do here")

Please let me know if I can be of any help,

Thanks,

Hermann

Migrating PerformancePoint Charts to another server

It seems that the migration of PerformancePoint content like charts, between servers have been somewhat of a vague area for many of us. I searched around the internet and found that quite a lot of people, like the people in our team, opted to recreate all the content on the new server. This is obviously not a very efficient migration method at all, and this is just not suitable for moving content to the production server of a client.

I found a solution to a part of our problem, but not to the whole problem. Dan English is a BI developer and it seems to me that the guy knows what he's talking about. Read what he has to say about migrating content between servers:

http://denglishbi.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/migrating-performancepoint-2010-content-to-new-server/

The problem with his solution is that we need to have a connection to both the "old" server from where we want to migrate the content and to the "new" server to where we want to migrate the content. I am sure some of you can immediately see that this is still not the optimal solution for migrating content to a client server although it can be done.

What I am looking for is a way for us to package the content that we want to migrate and then restore it on the client server. One of my teammates suggested that it might be possible to do this by backing up the Sharepoint site or site collection (all our content is deployed to Sharepoint sites), but we have not had the time to look into it.

I would appreciate it if anyone can suggest anything. We are working on this and I will definitely post the solution once we have found it!

Thanks,

Hermann