Reporting Services SharePoint Large Parameter List Issue & Fix

UPDATE (11/13/2012): Additional modification needed to provide ability to manage the parameters in SharePoint (see the bottom of the post for the updates)

If you are using Reporting Services (SSRS) in SharePoint Integrated Mode (I saw this issue with SSRS 2008 R2 SP2 & SSRS 2012 with SharePoint 2010 running with SP1 CU Aug 2012), then something you might want to be aware of.  If you ever have to load a parameter list with lots of records (say 35K+) then you might end up receiving a message like this:

An error (Unable to read data from the transport connection: The connection was closed.) occurred while transmitting data over the HTTP channel.
An error (Unable to read data from the transport connection: The connection was closed.) occurred while transmitting data over the HTTP channel.
Unable to read data from the transport connection: The connection was closed.

 

If you are running the report in BIDS or SSDT or Reporting Services Native Mode you will be fine, just an issue with SharePoint Integrated Mode.  I also noticed this with a report that had approximately nine parameters (four were hidden) and two of them had approximately 10K records.  So I think it was the combination of the parameters along with some default values getting set that caused the issue.

REPRO: For a quick example of this issue you can easily replicate this with populating a parameter with the FactFinanceKey from the AdventureWorksDW2012 database.   Deploy the report to SharePoint and try and run it:)

I have filed a Microsoft Connect Bug for this here – Reporting Services (SSRS) SharePoint Large Parameter Issue

Well after a bunch of searching and digging through the forums, blogs, BOL, and additional documentation (and even tried an old ProClarity fix) I found the fix for the issue – MaxItemsInObjectGraph….yes, that was a setting that I had to incorporate into a couple of the configuration files for Reporting in SharePoint:S

The first forum posting that pointed me to the web.config and client.config files was Issue Exporting SSRS 2012 Report to CSV file in SharePoint 2010 (MaxReceivedMessageSize property exceeded) and then after doing some additional research running live log tracing on SharePoint I tracked down that it was really related to the WCF and I came across this additional MaxItemsInObjectGraph setting in quit a few posts such as this one MaxItemsInObjectGraph and keeping references when serializing in WCF.

Now I didn’t find the magic post that just told me what to do, but with some trial-and-error I came up with the following steps to fix this:

1. Edit the web.config file in the following location C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebServices\Reporting

NOTE: prior to modifying a config file, always make a backup of the file first and use a text editor like notepad, notepad++ to modify the file, do not use a rich text editor.

2. In the web.config file find the <behaviors> section and make the following addition:

    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <!–
            Notes:
             1) maxConcurrentCalls is set to 16(default value in .Net3.5)*Processor Count(assuming 32)
             2) maxConcurrentInstances is set to 512 since InstanceContextMode is PerCall
             3) These settings can be removed after upgrading to .Net 4.0
         –>
        <behavior name=”RSExecutionBehavior”>
        <serviceThrottling maxConcurrentCalls=”512″ maxConcurrentInstances=”512″ />
        <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled=”true” />
        <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults=”true” />
        <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph=”2147483647″ />
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
    </behaviors>

3. Save the file and then go and edit the client.config file, remember to make a backup copy prior to modifying it.  This file is located in the following location C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\Reporting\

4. In the client.config file add the following section below the <System.ServiceModel> tag and before the <client> tag

  <system.serviceModel>
    <behaviors>
      <endpointBehaviors>
        <behavior name=”RSExecutionBehavior”>
      <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph=”2147483647″ />
        </behavior>
      </endpointBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
    <client>

5. Now I also modified four of the endpoint settings in the <client> section to reference the new behavior that I added (IReportExecution and IReportStreamingAsyncClient):

<endpoint name=”https” contract=”Microsoft.ReportingServices.ServiceContract.IReportExecution” binding=”customBinding” bindingConfiguration=”https” behaviorConfiguration=”RSExecutionBehavior”/>
<endpoint name=”http” contract=”Microsoft.ReportingServices.ServiceContract.IReportExecution” binding=”customBinding” bindingConfiguration=”http”  behaviorConfiguration=”RSExecutionBehavior”/>

…

<endpoint name=”https” contract=”Microsoft.ReportingServices.ServiceContract.IReportStreamingAsyncClient” binding=”customBinding” bindingConfiguration=”httpsStreaming”  behaviorConfiguration=”RSExecutionBehavior”/>
<endpoint name=”http” contract=”Microsoft.ReportingServices.ServiceContract.IReportStreamingAsyncClient” binding=”customBinding” bindingConfiguration=”httpStreaming”  behaviorConfiguration=”RSExecutionBehavior”/>

6. Once that was done I had to restart the server where the Reporting Services application was running.  The web.config settings seemed to work right away, but not the client.config settings.  Once it restarted I warmed up SharePoint and got SSRS running again.  I tested out my report and it started up just fine, no error message:)

And that is the fix, can’t believe this is the first time I have come across this issue, but now there is a fix and it is documented:D  Just a word of caution, this still does not perform as well as it does in SSRS Native Mode, but at least it does work now.  It appears that it takes maybe twice as long to load in SharePoint as it does through the Report Manger (your mileage may vary though).

I have filed a Microsoft Connect Bug for this here – Reporting Services (SSRS) SharePoint Large Parameter Issue

UPDATE (11/13/2012): Additional modification needed to provide ability to manage the parameters in SharePoint –

One quick update on this – there is one more additional service & endpoint that needs to be updated in the config files as well. The reason is so that you can manage the parameters in SharePoint if needed.

Web: <service name=”Microsoft.ReportingServices.ServiceRuntime.ReportServiceManagement” behaviorConfiguration=”RSExecutionBehavior”>

Client: <endpoint name=”https” contract=”Microsoft.ReportingServices.ServiceContract.IReportServiceManagement” binding=”customBinding” bindingConfiguration=”https” behaviorConfiguration=”RSExecutionBehavior”/>

I added the behaviorConfiguration reference. Not only did I update this in the web.config file, I also updated the endpoints in the client.config file as well. It seems like it picked up on the change without a reboot this time as well, so the web.config setting seemed to work, but wanted to keep things in synch so I updated the client.config as well. This time though I did receive a valid SharePoint error message and was able to look it up in the logs to pinpoint the additional service being referenced for this operation. There are two other items in the config file – ReportServiceBackgroundProcessing and AlertManagement – and I have not had to alter these ones yet.

NOTE: Also, in a multi-server environment I had to update the client.config file on the WFE server (web.config did not exist since it wasn’t the application server) and restart that one to get the reports to behave consistently.

Presenting Power View Reports to Users

As you begin to use the new Power View reporting feature that is available with the Reporting Services 2012 integration in SharePoint 2010 one of the things that you will need to assess is how you are going to allow the users to access the reports.  What are the different options that you have when providing access to the Power View report files (rdlx) in SharePoint?

Here is a list of options that you could use:

• store the Power View reports in a Document Library
• display the Power View reports in a PowerPivot Gallery
• use a Page Viewer Web Part to display the Power View report
• use a Silverlight Web Part to display the Power View report

Here is how each of these will look to the end-user that will be access the reports:

Document Library

Above we can see that the Power View report files are available and stored in a document library, nothing really fancy, just storing the rdlx files.

PowerPivot Gallery

The PowerPivot Gallery is a very nice option to display the Power View reports. Provides a nice visual display of the reports and users are able to see if additional views are included in the files as well.  The view I have displayed above is the default Gallery setup, but additional options are available such as just displaying the files in the document layout like the Document Library display in the first example, Theater, and Carousel.

Page Viewer Web Part

The Pager Viewer web part is a nice option to include a Power View report (or a particular view) on a page.  This is a nice option to include a Power View report into any existing page and to provide a nice controlled output of the report.  You can see that the ‘Preview Bar’ has been removed from the top of the report so a user is not able to access the ‘Edit Report’ option.  The users are still able to interact with the report and access the different views in the report as well.

How do you configure the Page Viewer web part?  Pretty basic and a bit easier than the next option that will be looked at.

1. Create a web part page
2. Add a Page Viewer web part to the page
3. Specify the URL path along with additional parameters for the report
4. Specify the height and width for the web part for the appearance

Here is what the Page Viewer web part settings look like for the example displayed above:

Here is the URL path that I have specified along with some additional parameters that I am setting to provide the desired output:

/_layouts/ReportServer/AdHocReportDesigner.aspx?RelativeReportUrl=/Shared%20Documents/Hotel%20Performance%20Dashboard.rdlx&ViewMode=Presentation&ReportSection=ReportSection2&True&Fit=True&PreviewBar=False

In this example I am setting the View Mode, the Report Section I want to display, and hiding the Preview Bar.  These are the core settings that need to be set to get this output.  There are additional settings that you can explore and a few of these I discuss here in the following post URL Actions with Reporting Services Power View (RTM) and as one person commented there are additional parameters available and you can see these by accessing the properties of the output in PowerPoint as discussed here Can i edit my PowerView Report exported to PowerPoint in Presentation Mode? YES YOU CAN.

If we dig into the above output for the Pager View web part we can see that the output is displayed in an iframe and granted just by removing the Preview Bar doesn’t mean that the user couldn’t track down the actual location of the report and launch it from there, so this by no means is a security option.  The user still needs the proper permissions to the Power View report file (Restricted Readers – requires the ability to Open Items and this is different compared to regular Reporting Services reports because of the Silverlight application).

Silverlight Web Part

The Silverlight web part display looks identical to the Page Viewer.  This option requires a bit more of setup and I have to thank Robert Bruckner for the details on configuring this option.

1. Create a web part page
2. Add a Silverlight web part to the page
3. Specify the URL path to the Silverlight application
4. Specify the custom initialization parameters (Other Settings)
5. Specify the height and width for the web part for the appearance

The path to the Silverlight application is the following:

/_layouts/ReportServer/ClientBin/Microsoft.Reporting.AdHoc.Shell.Bootstrapper.xap

The custom initialization parameters that I used in the example above are the following:

ItemPath=http://win-doqtev64aj4/Shared%20Documents/Hotel%20Performance%20Dashboard.rdlx,ReportServerUri=http://win-doqtev64aj4/_vti_bin/reportserver/,ViewMode=Presentation,PreviewBar=False,Fit=True,ReportSection=ReportSection2

The template Robert provided for this setup is the following for the parameters:

ItemPath=http://<YourServername>/<YourSite>/YourReport.rdlx,ReportServerUri=http://<YourServername>/_vti_bin/reportserver/,ViewMode=Presentation,PreviewBar=False,Fit=True

Here is what the Silverlight web part settings look like for my example above:

When you add the Silverlight web part to the page you will be prompted for the URL path for the Silverlight application. That setting and address is also available in the above screenshot in the Application settings when you click on the ‘Configure…’ button.

You can once again dig into the output like we did above with the IE Developer Tools (F12) and you will see the following:

A little different output here and if you dig around enough you will eventually track down the initialization parameters, so once again not an option to prevent the users from finding out the original source of the file, but it is still an option that you can use to display Power View reports in a web page.

Summary

So to wrap up this post, I just wanted to show the different options you have available in SharePoint to display and provide access to Power View reports to end-users.  The first two options allow the users to launch the reports in the web browser and access the Edit Report or go into Full Screen modes.  I would use the PowerPivot Gallery option because of the nice output and provides the users quick insight as to what is included in the report and an overview of the different views (if more than one exists).  The last two options would be something to explore if you want to include a Power View report on a web page.  This is a nice clean option where we have removed the Preview Bar, but have still allowed the user access to the report to interact and browse the different views.  This could be a nice option if say you want to include a Power View report in a PerformancePoint dashboard.

I hope you have enjoyed this quick overview and for more information on how to use Power View and creating tabular models, don’t forget to check out our book here – Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View.

URL Actions with Reporting Services Power View (RTM)

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Yesterday we took a quick peek inside the RDLX file – Inside the Power View RDLX File.  Today we will take a step back into SharePoint and explore what we can do when we access the Power View files through the URL.

WARNING: The items that are displayed and discussed here are not documented at all by Microsoft and could potentially change at any point down the road, so use at your own risk.

Many of you might be familiar with Reporting Services (SSRS) and creating report files (RDL).  With these files you have a lot of flexibility with your design and you can also leverage a lot of commands and syntax when accessing these files through the URL (in Report Manager or SharePoint) – URL Access Parameter Reference.

So what is available with v1 of Power View with the RTM release of SQL Server 2012?

Unfortunately not a whole lot.  But we do have a couple of things:

1. ViewMode
2. ReportSection

Hmmm….they don’t look like anything we had available with previous report files.  You are absolutely correct.  These are new options that are specific to Power View files (RDLX files).  With these files we can determine how the initial viewing mode is – currently only presentation (reading mode) or edit – and then which report (view) you want to look at (assuming you have multiple views in your report files).

So let’s take a quick peek at what these options look like:

ViewMode

With the ViewMode option you currently have two options you can use, either Presentation (Reading) or Edit

Presentation (Reading) mode is the initial view state of Power View files that you see when you access a RDLX file in SharePoint

Edit mode is what you see when you open up the canvas and have the options to be able to alter and change the layout of the report

You can now see that by switching the ViewMode value from Presentation to Edit we go from the Reading mode to the Edit mode where the canvas is available and we can modify the layout and design of the Power View report file.

ReportSection

What are ReportSections? In the RDLX file layout, a ReportSection is actual the equivalent of a view in a report file.  So if you have multiple views you will have multiple ReportSection tags within the ReportSections portion of the RDL file that is embedded in the RDLX file (see previous post for information on this – Inside the Power View RDLX File).   Take the file from our previous post and we can see the XML layout as follows:

The ReportSections area is setup so that when you export into PowerPoint and access the views in say the PowerPivot Gallery it knows which view of the RDLX file to display and output.

In looking at our example up above you can see that we have 4 views included in the Power View report.  In the XML displayed here we see 4 ReportSection tags in the RDL file and the naming convention is ReportSection, ReportSection2, ReportSection3, and ReportSection4.

So with the naming convention displayed here let’s go back to our URL expressions above and expand on them and include the ReportSection into the URL address to change from the first view in the Power View report file to the second:

By using the ReportSection command we have been able to navigate from the first view (report) in our file (ReportSection=ReportSection) to the second view (ReportSection=ReportSection2).  Pretty slick!

As you can image this will work for the third and fourth views in the report file as well.

So for now this is what we have available to us, just ViewMode and ReportSection.  It does provide you the means to be able to send an end-user to a specific view within a Power View report file (assuming you have more than one view defined).

If you want to find out more about Power View and want to learn about designing Tabular models to support Power View, don’t forget to check out our book – Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View.

Enjoy!

Inside the Power View RDLX File

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So if you have downloaded and started playing with the new SQL Server 2012, one of the new features you can use with SharePoint 2010 and Reporting Services is Power View.  Power View is a new self-service reporting tool developed by the Reporting Services team and it currently works against Tabular BI Semantic Models (so either PowerPivot files in SharePoint or Tabular SSAS databases).

Now when you create a new Power View report you might realize that it doesn’t create just an RDL file anymore, they are now RDLX files.  Theses files are really zip files, so just like PowerPivot XLSX files you can simply rename these files with a ZIP extension and explore the contents.

So what is inside?  Let’s take a quick peek:

Here I have renamed an RDLX file called Hotel Performance Dashboard that I downloaded from SharePoint with the ZIP extension and extracted the contents.  Inside nothing too interesting yet, but I see a folder called ‘Reports’.  Let’s take a look in there…

Now this looks a little more interesting and what do you know, an RDL file…what is in there?  I won’t paste the whole contents here, but I will give you a little screenshot of what the contents include:

Now this is what we are used to seeing, XML with DataSources, DataSets, etc.  We can even see the DAX that is generated and used to retrieve our data for the report!  Really nice.

Some other things that we will see in here are ReportSections:

More on these in another post that will be coming up soon.

So let’s go back to that ZIP folder and see what else might have been in there tucked away…I think I saw a folder called Metadata…

Cool, look at that, the snapshot images of our views in our Power View report file.

Okay, so that is a quick tour of the RDLX file, up next…Power View URL commands…coming really soon!

And by the way, if you haven’t heard, the new Power View book, Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View has been released, so check it out and let me know what you think.  Not only does it include information about Power View, but also how to build Tabular BI Semantic Models, use DAX, how to build a BI Virtual Environment, and it is loaded with ‘Learn By Doing’ exercises and videos as well!

Resources

– Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View (book) – http://tinyurl.com/powerviewbook

– Microsoft Business Intelligence http://tinyurl.com/msftbi

– Power View Overview http://tinyurl.com/mspowerview
– Power View Samples – 6 samples to test out http://tinyurl.com/msbitryit

Upgrade PowerPivot SharePoint from SQL 2012 RC0 to RTM

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So last week I was doing a presentation on Self-Service BI with SQL Server 2012 at the TechFuse MN technical conference and I realized that my demo virtual machine was still running SQL Server 2012 RC0.  I was thinking that I shouldn’t do my presentation and demos using RC0, so why not upgrade.  Probably not the best idea to do this just a few days out from a presentation, but I had my fingers cross and just went for it.

I found some guidance from a thread in the forums by Jen Underwood here Upgrade in place RC0 to RTM and decided to go for it.  I did the in-place upgrade and my SharePoint virtual machine with SQL 2012 was still functioning after I completed all of the steps.  Then I moved on to testing my integrated SSRS setup and realized that the Power View reports were not working and neither were my data sources.  The quick fix for that was to go into Central Administration and go into the properties of the Reporting Services application and click OK.  That completed the upgrade process for my shared service and my Power View reports functioned properly after that.

Next was to verify my PowerPivot was still working.  I opened up my PowerPivot files and uploaded them to SharePoint.  The snapshots appeared in the PowerPivot Gallery just fine, but I was unable to work with the files (the slicers did not work, I received error messages as shown below).  I also went into Central Administration and tried to checkout the PowerPivot management dashboard.  In doing this I received the same error message below:

An error occurred during an attempt to establish a connection to the external data source. The following connection failed to refresh: PowerPivot Data

I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed, but after the fix for the SSRS shared service I was thinking that maybe I needed to do the same for the PowerPivot application.  SO I decided that I would try to re-run the PowerPivot configuration tool which is new with the SQL Server 2012 installation.

The following are the screenshots of running the PowerPivot Configuration Tool with the SQL Server 2012 RTM installation software against my virtual machine that was RC0:

Once that was done I went back into Central Administration and checked out the PowerPivot Management Dashboard again:

Everything was working as expected again and no more error messages! Victory!

That was quite the relief and I was able to do my presentation with my newly upgraded RTM release of SQL Server 2012, not bad for doing an in-place upgrade just a few days prior to the big event.  This included three instances of SSAS (multidimensional, tabular, and PowerPivot), the SQL database engine, SSRS, SSRS SharePoint integrated, SSIS, and DQS as well.

Here is some additional information if you are looking to do the upgrade for DQS – Upgrade DQS: SQL Server 2012 RC0 to SQL Server 2012 RTM.

Using Styles in Microsoft Power View

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The other night I was working on some final chapter reviews of our upcoming book Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View and I stumbled across something new in the RTM release of Microsoft Power View.  A new feature called Styles that provides theming capabilities with the views in the report files. Let’s take a quick look at where this new feature is located and what this can do to your views.

Now when you launch Power View in your browser you will see a new tab in the ribbon called Styles next to the Home tab.  When you click on this you will see that you are provided 8 different accent color themes to choose from as shown above.

So what do these look like?

Accent 1

Accent 2

Accent 3

(same as Accent 2 with exception of 1st color)

Accent 4

Accent 5

Accent 6

(same as Accent 5 with exception of 1st color)

Accent 7

(same as Accent 1 with slightly different blue color)

Accent 8

Now the one thing to note is that the Styles will change the colors for the entire view, so this includes all of the items (tables, slicers, etc.), not just one particular visualization.

The other thing to note here is that if you have multiple views in your report file that each view can have its own accent color setup.

So when designing your reports you have some options for colors to select from.  Nothing custom like you have available in Reporting Services reports, but at least you have something unlike say PerformancePoint.

So that is a quick intro and overview of the new Styles option in Power View, hope you enjoyed the quick tour.

If you are looking for more information and guidance don’t forget to check out our book that will be coming out very soon – Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power View.

Using PerformancePoint Services (PPS) with PowerPivot SQL Server 2012 RC0

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Last year I did a posting on Using PowerPivot with PerformancePoint Services (PPS) 2010. I thought it would be a good idea to do an updated posting with the new release of PowerPivot that will be coming out this year to show the new features that you will be able to take advantage of now.

Before we get started I need to point out that if you setup your SharePoint environment with a fresh install of SQL Server 2012 that you will also need to download and install the Analysis Services ADOMD.NET (version 10.5) data provider from the SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Feature Pack.

I had previously tried to reference PowerPivot SQL Server 2012 in the “Denali” CTP3 and in RC0 release and received the following error message when trying to configure the connection string in the PerformancePoint data source setup:

An error occurred connecting to this data source. Please check the data source for any unsaved changes and click on Test Data Source button to confirm connection to the data source.

I was glad that after reporting this that a resolution was found and that simply installing the older version of the ADOMD.NET provider was able to bridge the gap to the new version of the PowerPivot files with PerformancePoint – You Can Use SQL Server “Denali” PowerPivot Models as PerformancePoint 2010 Data Sources.  After you install the version 10.5 release of the data provider you will need to perform a iisreset after the installation to get this working properly in your environment so that you can create the data source in Dashboard Designer.  The previous version of the ADOMD.NET data provider was not needed to connect to the new Tabular version of SSAS, just for PowerPivot.

What’s New?

Okay, so now that we got that covered what are we able to do with the new release of PowerPivot?  Let’s take a look and see what has changed.

New Features Available in PowerPivot (disclaimer: this is based on the SQL Server 2012 RC0 release of PowerPivot) to use with PerformancePoint:

• Hierarchies! – yes, now we can define hierarchies in our data model such as Calendar with Year, Quarter, Month, and Date levels or Products with Category, Subcategory, and Product levels. In order to add hierarchies you have to use the new Diagram View that is another new feature to see a visual representation of your data model.  In addition to this you can also setup Parent-Child hierarchies as well with some of the new DAX capabilities with the PATH and PATHITEM functions to setup your levels and get at the relationships.
• Measures and formatting – measures are defined in the PowerPivot Window and part of our model. Another very nice feature that we can do now is set the format for measures that we define in the data model. So if we want to display the sales or profit we can do this in currency or if we want to display gross profit margin we can do that as a percent and we can specify the comma separator and number of decimals as well.
• Column sorting – in the R2 release of PowerPivot you might have noticed that everything was sorting alphabetically. So if you worked with say days of the week or month names you would have had to come up with some alternate naming conventions to get the values to display in the correct order that we are used to seeing them. Well in the 2012 release we now have the ability to base the sort order of a column off another columns, just like we can do in the Multidimensional Analysis Services development. So if we have a column for month number of year we can use that to properly sort the month names and we no longer have to incorporate the month number into the description that we display in our reports.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – you can define these now in your data model, but unfortunately at the time of this post you are not able to import KPIs from Tabular data models.  There is currently an open bug on connect related to this issue – can’t make PerformancePoint scorecard by importing tabular KPIs (feel free to vote this one up).
• Drillthrough (show details) – there is now drillthrough support for Tabular data models, so you can use the show details options on measures in your Analytical Reports. Granted you don’t have any abilities to customize the drillthrough output in PowerPivot models (Tabular will have this thanks to Greg Galloway and BIDS Helper), but you can see the detail data in the table that makes up the number.

Hierarchies

In the new Diagram View we can now right-click on a column in one of our tables and select the context menu option ‘Create Hierarchy’

We can then provide a meaningful name to the hierarchy (something besides Hierarchy1) and drag additional columns down into the hierarchy to add levels for users to provide the navigation path.

Now in this example I already used the RELATED function to pull in the product category and subcategory names into the product table.  I have also hidden the ProductSubcategory and ProductCategory tables from client tools so they will not be visible to the users when the data model is deployed (in the first image you can see that those tables are dimmed out, more transparent than the product table).  Now I might want to go ahead and rename the last item in my hierarchy here so that it is a little more cleaner.

In doing so you can see that in parenthesis I can still see the actual column in my data that it is referencing.  Now I could go ahead and hide the individual source columns that are being represented in our hierarchy.  This would force the users of the model to have to use the hierarchy to navigate the data.  That would be fine in most cases, but if you are going to use this data model with Power View you will want to keep them in the model since the initial release of Power View in SQL Server 2012 will not support hierarchies.  So if you hide them then you will not be able to see those columns or the hierarchy in your model and the users would not be able to properly analyze and report on the data.

In addition to the typical user defined hierarchies I also mentioned there is support for parent-child hierarchies.  So if you have a self-referencing table such as an Employee table that contains EmployeeKey and ParentEmployeeKey columns you can utilize DAX to establish the hierarchy path for each row and then defined the levels like the following:

=PATH(Employee[EmployeeKey], Employee[ParentEmployeeKey])

And once you have that setup you can setup additional calculated columns for each of the levels in the path that can then be used back in the Diagram View to establish the hierarchy just like the Products one above.

=LOOKUPVALUE(Employee[EmployeeName],Employee[EmployeeKey], PATHITEM(Employee[EmployeePath], 1,1))

Measures and Formatting

Another nice feature is the ability to designate the format output of the measures you define.  In the R2 release of PowerPivot you had to do this in Excel where you also created the measures and it was not actually part of the data model.  Well in this release not only is this capability part of the data model, but so are the measures.

First of all you have the ability to create and define explicit measures in your data model now.  There is a new portion in each table in our PowerPivot Window called the Calculation Area.  This is where we can define measures that will then become part of our data model.  Granted measures can still be created in Excel, but in doing this they will not get added back into the data model and exposed in the PowerPivot Window.

Now that we have some measures defined we can go ahead and add formatting to each of these by selecting the measure and using the Formatting section in the Home tab of the Ribbon or right-clicking on the measure and selecting Format… to open up the Formatting dialog box.

NOTE: when using PowerPivot with tools like PerformancePoint, Report Builder, and Report Designer (BIDS) you will need to define explicit measures.  Implicit measures will work in Excel with PowerPivot and in Power View, but not with these other tools.

The Calculation Area is a free form area and you can enter measures in any of the cells and the syntax you use is Measure Name:=[DAX Expression]

In the first screenshot above where I have the Reseller Total Sales measure I could actually take that and enter that in the Calculation Area in another table if I wanted.  In doing so I would have to alter the DAX a bit and make a direct reference to the table name like such – Reseller Total Sales:=SUM(ResellerSales[SalesAmount])

Column Sorting

In the v2 release of PowerPivot we now have the ability to define the way a column is sorted based on another column.  So for example in my Date table if I have a column called EnglishDayNameOfWeek with values Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc. and I have another column called DayNumberOfWeek with values 1, 2, 3, etc. I can set the sort order of the first column to be based on the second column.  If we did not do this then the names would simply be sorted alphabetically like they were in v1 of PowerPivot.  In v1 of PowerPivot you could simply sort the values in Ascending order in a PivotTable to correct this, but in Slicers you did not have that ability and would have to typically setup a calculated column to sort the values properly like 1 Sun, 2 Mon, 3 Tue, etc.

Once you have the column selected you can then select the Sort by Column option in the Ribbon.  This will then open up the Sort by Column dialog box where you can specify the column to be sorted and then which column defines how it should be sorted.

You can use this to not only get typical items sorted properly like the days of the week and month names, but you could also use this to define custom report sorting that users would like to see.  So say you have predefined names you use to categorize your customers based on their sales like Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, etc. and this is how you want them displayed on your report (in this particular order).  Well now you can be defining another column in the table that has the values 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. respectively and setup the Sort by Column.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Defining KPIs in the PowerPivot models is a new feature that is available.  As I mentioned though, currently you are not able to import these into PerformancePoint to create an Analysis Services scorecard like you can with Multidimensional Analysis Services.  As an example though, here is what you can do if you want to set this up so that you can use them in Excel (which could then be displayed with Excel Services in your dashboard) or with Reporting Services (which could also be displayed in your dashboard).

First you need to define an explicit measure like we already did above with Reseller Total Sales.  Once you have this selected you can then click on the Create KPI option available in the Measures section of the Home tab in the Ribbon or you can right-click on the measure and select the option to Create KPI…  This will then open up the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dialog box.

In the dialog box you can then specify the target to compare the measure to and this can reference another measure in the data model or an absolute value.  Once you have that defined you can then adjust the thresholds and select your icon styles.  Make sure you pick an appropriate icon style that not only has a color option, but also a shape to differentiate it because as I have noted before, there are people that are color blind (so do not just go with the default first icon style selection).

The other thing that you can do is specify some descriptions for the KPI (descriptions are another new feature and these are available on other items such as tables, columns, and measures).  The descriptions are then displayed to the end-user in say Excel when they are working with the PowerPivot field list and hovering over the items.

Once you have this setup you will notice a new icon next to the measure in the Calculation area (and in the Diagram View) which signifies that it is now configured as a KPI.

Just remember, you cannot import these currently into PerformancePoint, so you will still have to manually setup the KPIs.  Hopefully this will be resolved, just watch the Connect item link I provided above and feel free to vote it up as well.

Drillthrough (Show Details)

Not much to say here other than the fact that you can now get to the detail records that make up a particular measure value when displayed in Excel and in PerformancePoint.  So in PerformancePoint if you have the KPIs setup with the Data value calculation instead of the Default or you are displaying the measures in an Analytical Report you will now be able to select the Show Details option and actually display the individual rows that are in that table that make up the value.

The End Result – Dashboard in PPS

Okay, so now we know what the features are we can use, what do they look like in PerformancePoint.  Let’s take a look at that.

And last but not least….

Pretty sweet and I am looking forward to the new feature support.

If you are looking for the downloadable sample files for SQL Server 2012 take a look here SQL Server 2012 Samples ReadMe.

Twin Cities ScarePoint Saturday Follow Up

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I attended my very first SharePoint Saturday event in Minnesota.  I was extremely impressed with the organization of the event, speaker dinner was fabulous, and the location was very nice.  I was curious to speak to a SharePoint audience versus my typical SQL Server and Business Intelligence audiences.  I was impressed to find out that over half the audience that attended my presentation knew what PerformancePoint was and quite a few were using either PerformancePoint 2007, 2010, or even ProClarity.

The presentation was going pretty good and we were going through the content at a good pace until all of a sudden out of the blue it was as if someone pulled the plug on my laptop.  My laptop decided to go into hibernation mode and I was not able to wake it back up.  I tried to disconnect and reconnect the projector, unplug the power, etc. and in the end I had to simply shut it down.  This was not a good thing because I had my virtual environment up and running all set to go for my demo as well.  Needless to say this generated some downtime, so I was fielding questions while I tried to get my laptop and environment up and running again to resume my presentation.  Pretty much threw my game off and I would have liked to have spent some more time with my demo to cover all of the features and provide more explanations.

I definitely apologize to the attendees of my session.  I was just in shock and couldn’t believe it.  I was very bummed out and felt awful, just something that you don’t plan on happening when presenting.

I think I probably spent too much time on the history and overview and should have done more demos and gone over maybe the setup of how PerformancePoint is enabled.  Just goes to show you that based on the SharePoint audience there are items that are of more interest and I should have focused on that versus what I am used to doing for a SQL Server and Business Intelligence group.

As with all presentations you get the feedback and learn on how to build off the experience to adjust and make the next one better.