Sunday, May 01, 2005

SharePoint issue list reports and Office 2003 web parts

Windows SharePoint Services contains out of the box an issue list which you can use to track change request or problem reports about your product. If you go to the issue list you will also notice that there are some reports available for these issue lists. The great thing about these reports is that if Microsoft Office 2003 English Web Parts and Components (Freely downloadable) is installed on the server, the report generator for an issues list creates rich charts for report types. When a user clicks one of the report types on the Report page (reporthome.aspx), the user is directed to reportrich.aspx, which displays the chart. If the package is not installed, the user is instead directed to report.aspx and a rich chart is not displayed.

The page which actually generates these reports is quite interesting as well, it is located in the Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033 folder and gives an interesting example about how you can use a sharepoint list as a basis for a graph generated with Office 2003 web components. One of the greatest flaws about the Office 2003 webparts is that you can only use ODBC datasources, it would have been a lot better if they used the data source catalog like the dataview webpart. I guess that if you take a look at the code in reportrich.aspx, you will get some nice guidelines about how to accomplish this.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice post! It is something that really isn't apparent unless you do install the office web components which should be done on every installation! :)

Anonymous said...

I think things are a little jumbled here.

The Office WebParts and Components are a free download, but to use most of them you also need the Office 11 Web Components installed on each machine.

If you have office 2003 then this will already be there, otherwise it is a separate installation, and you need to be licensed.

I've not checked, but I would sispect the redirect relies on the presence of the web components, not the webparts ?

jopx said...

You will actually need both - Office 2003 webparts and Office 2003 web components,... if you have Office 2000 on the client, it will display a link to the Office 2003 web components which you can download and install.

You do not need a full license for the functionality used in these charts. If you have however a full version of Office 2003 installed you will have a richer feature set of the Office 2003 web components.

Anonymous said...

Can I reuse this report with other custom list, there is anyway I can assig the columns from the custom list and add the actions in the menu.

Thanks you very much.

Anonymous said...

I have installed OWC11 on my SharePoint Server (2.0) and tried to create few reports with the pivot table Web part but with no success.

I'm getting the following error:
"The Query Could not be processed. The data provider didn't supply any other error information"

I'm an administrator on the site/box. Do I have to install MS Office 2003 on the Server box, or it only need to be present on the client machine?

Anonymous said...

I have installed OWC11 on my SharePoint Server (2.0) and tried to create few reports with the pivot table Web part but with no success.

I'm getting the following error:
"The Query Could not be processed. The data provider didn't supply any other error information"

I'm an administrator on the site/box. Do I have to install MS Office 2003 on the Server box, or it only need to be present on the client machine?

I'm trying to report on Issues list from the same SharePoint site. When I was configuring the web part everything seems fine as I was able to chose the site and select what fields I need to include.

Please email me any suggestions at: mharoun_ca@hotmail.com

Peter Raymond said...

Anyone know how to do this in SharePoint 2007? I can't for the life of me find the link!

Hiran Salvi said...

Unfortunately I have been trying to get the same functionality achieved with MOSS 2007 but never got success. I have been after this since last 2 months but didn't get any sucess.