Center Pages with Business Intelligence Give ‘Error: An Unexpected Error has Occurred’ in BP 5.1

I’ve run into this problem several times, and it hit me again today. Let’s say you’ve got a Business Portal environment setup, and you’ve deployed the SSRS reports. This is a great way to get some nice dashboards in your BP environment. However, when you browse to any of the center pages in BP that have a dashboard on the center’s home page, you get the following error:

“Error: An Unexpected Error Has Occurred”

This error message comes complete with a correlation ID. If you check the SharePoint logs, the correlation ID really doesn’t tell us much about the error. This error is tied to a line in the web.config file that needs to be commented out. It’s a pretty easy fix.

1. On the BP server, browse to the virtual directory folder (C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\<port>).
2. Edit the web.config file (Notepad works best for this).
3. Find the following line:

4. <add key="ReportViewerMessages" value="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Analytics.UI.ReportViewerMessages, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />

5. Comment that line out, by adding a ‘<!–‘ to the beginning and a ‘–>’ to the end, like this:

6. <!--<add key="ReportViewerMessages" value="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Analytics.UI.ReportViewerMessages, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />-->

7. Close and save the web.config file, and run an IIS reset on the server.

Now you should be good to launch Business Portal and check your center pages and see if the reports display properly for you. As always, remember to make a backup of the web.config file before modifying anything in it!

 

Comparing Detail Information at the Summary Level

Had a tricky one come up today.  We are looking at a report that shows a breakdown of the summary level of information for items in inventory.  It’s a custom SRS report that pulls information on inventory counts from Maximum Data.  We have it pulling the summary level information, and a details report that shows the breakdown by bin.  We want to be able to show which ones need a second count, and there’s a field we’ve determined we can mark on a per bin basis.  This is perfect for the detail report, but how do we determine if we need to do a second count at the summary level?

At first, I was thinking I could do some sort of “IF ANY” exists statement, but I soon abandoned this idea.  Instead, being that the field was a binary field, I decided to convert it to an integer field to give me a specific 1 or 0 if the item was marked or not.  Once I had that, I could do a summation of the field to get a total.  I then decided to add a count of the field as well to tell me how many I should have.  Now, all I needed to do was compare the summation vs. the count, and anything that differed between the two (ie, 15 total, 18 counted), would tell me that I have a false item that I need to mark in my conditional formatting.

Long workaround, but something that is working pretty well now!