Monday, April 28, 2014

Power BI, Power View, Power Query and PowerPivot – interesting links

 

Solving invalid pointer array error message in Power View for Excel 2013

Last week my Power View reports suddenly gave an error “We couldn’t get data from the Data Model. Here’s the error message we got: Invalid pointer array”

Luckily a colleague pointed to the correct solution on the forums – KB2752087 breaks PowerView in Microsoft Excel 2013. Apparently this was caused by the automatic update KB2752087 – so uninstalling this update would solve the above error but since it is pushed out by Windows Update that will not help a lot. The solution for this seems to be installing hotfix KB 2837666

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Managed metadata – lookup terms using custom properties in CSOM

 

SharePoint Server 2013 introduces the notion of custom properties on specific terms in managed metadata termset and with  the added support for .NET client object model (CSOM) for managed metadata APIs you have some quite interesting scenarios that you can imagine (Check out managed metadata and navigation in SharePoint Server 2013)

A typical scenario is one in which you have a master system for which you want to export some parts to a termset in the managed metadata store. To make this to happen you will however need a key from the master system to be linked to the different terms that you are creating. Listed below is some sample code to look for a specific term based on a custom property.

   1:          static Term GetTermByCustomID(string customid)
   2:          {
   3:              Term retTerm = null;
   4:   
   5:              CustomPropertyMatchInformation matchinfo = new CustomPropertyMatchInformation(Program.clientContext);
   6:              matchinfo.CustomPropertyName = "ID";
   7:              matchinfo.CustomPropertyValue = customid;
   8:              matchinfo.TrimUnavailable = false;
   9:   
  10:              var terms = termSet.GetTermsWithCustomProperty(matchinfo);
  11:              Program.clientContext.Load(terms);
  12:              Program.clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
  13:   
  14:              if (terms.Count > 0)
  15:              {
  16:                  retTerm = terms[0];
  17:              }
  18:              
  19:              return retTerm;
  20:   
  21:          }



One of the things which puzzled me for quite a while was the TrimUnavailable property – but recently the documentation got updated which made it a little more clear - see TermSet.GetTermsWithCustomProperty method (String, String, StringMatchOption, Int32, Boolean) – apparently it is indicates whether to trim out Term objects that have the IsAvailableForTagging property set to false.


Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Session Yammer and SharePoint social data mining at SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2014

I will be doing a session on social data mining on SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2014 –  Yammer and SharePoint social data mining - actionable insights into what drives your co-workers and employees

Enterprise social tools such as Yammer and SharePoint allow you to listen to what is driving your employees. In this session we will examine how analytics tools can be use to monitor employee sentiment, predict employee churn or how they can be incorporated in an employee evaluation process. Attendees will explore how to use the different social APIs - both for Yammer and SharePoint as well as data mining and analysis tools to present employee social data in dashboards using Excel Services, Power BI and Visio Services which provide actionable insights.

Also check out the other speakers on SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2014 and the different sessions at SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2014