Rod

Mile Long Bridge

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000-06:00

I never get tired of this view. Ever.

ducks flying south in January

2012-01-08T08:21:00.000-06:00

kind of unusual to see this time of year. It is finally getting cold enough for them to want to get out of dodge. IE the water is finally freezing up. Bad year for Ice Fishing. Everyone else seems happy though.

URL Encoding Saves the day in SSRS and SharePoint

2011-12-29T07:59:00.000-06:00

Ok so an issue I have had off and on over the past few months. More annoying than anything. I usually before this found a good way to work around it. But this week I didn't have any viable options for working around this. I needed a text box to have a URL link to another page and it needed to include the ID parameter for that other page for lookup. Unfortunately SSRS when ran in Visual Studio worked perfectly. However when the report was deployed to the ReportingServices Server. It doubled up the ID field each time. So I would end up with a link like the following
http://myserver/reportserver/report1.rdl?ID=123&ID=123
It was doubling up the ID every time. Nothing out on Google about this one. And then the target URL would not render correctly. UGH!
So, I started playing around. My Expression was something like this
="http://myserver/reportserver/report1.rdl?ID=" & Fields!ID.Value
Which looks right.
No doubling up there. So I took out the Fields!ID.Value and hardcoded in my "123"
Still doubles up.
Ok, Put it as one long string.
Still doubles up.
dropped the ID= and left 123
that shows ?123 on the URL but no doubling up. OK now we are onto something. Is it the equal sign?
Replaced the equal sign with the HTML URL encoding value from
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/html/html_url_encoding.htm
So the expression for the URL becomes this
="http://myserver/reportserver/report1.rdl?ID%3d" & Fields!ID.Value
And low and behold that works perfectly. All the time everytime. YAY

So there you go. URL Encoding saves the day.

the frozen shores of Saylorville lake.

2011-12-29T05:43:00.000-06:00

frozen shores of Saylorville

We are going on a bear hunt

2011-12-28T11:17:00.000-06:00

Oh no, Ice, We can't go under it. We cannot go around it. And mom and dad won't let us go over it. I guess we will just have to play near it.

Looks like a winter storm

2011-12-27T08:11:00.000-06:00

Is coming in. It wasn't there was almost no reason for it to look this threatening. But it sure looked like there was something brewing up. Gorgeous evening.

Saylorville this evening

2011-12-26T16:54:00.000-06:00

Cold, windy, almost frozen but not quite there. It really was that blue out there.

moon and clouds

2011-11-11T09:53:00.001-06:00

Taken last night. The moon was behind the clouds and it was gorgeous!

Soccer anyone

2011-10-18T15:07:00.001-05:00

This actually isn't photoshopped or anything. just turned out from the camera this way.

Small Church Childrens sermon

2011-10-11T08:49:00.002-05:00

Small town Iowa everywhere on Sunday's. They do not have enough children anymore to have a Sunday school on Sundays a lot of the time. So they have begun having what they call the Children's message. Usually about 5-10 minutes in the middle of the church service where the children can come forward and get candy for listening to the Pastor talk about something fairly important. I do think the adults who are just starting their search for God get more out of these messages than the children do. The Pastor this week was handing out nerf footballs. So of course my son was right there on that one.

140 years and still going

2011-10-10T12:31:00.001-05:00

Platte Center Church, where Helene and I got married, had their 140 celebration this weekend. It was both fun and neat to see. They have been a church in the middle of nowhere for 140 years. seriously very rural iowa.

SharePoint locking down all the web parts at once

2011-10-04T08:49:00.002-05:00

I needed a script to update all the webparts(6 a page) on a host of underlying sites(100+). Or on specific sites. I had to make sure the users were not hiding the webparts or rearranging them. You see the executives had made the call on what should show on these pages and the users who had update capabilities in EPM and PWA (Microsoft Project Server) were not supposed to go in willy nilly and hide things if they didn’t want to see them. And yes people were doing that. I know there are whole ton of security issues with what we did here. But this was probably the easiest rather than having a temp go into each individual site and turn off allow minimize and allow close. (something like 12000 clicks)

So here is your Script

$site = Get-SPSite "http://bergren.net" ##SP is not on this server##

foreach ($web in $site.AllWebs)

{

#write-host $web.Title

foreach($List in $web.Lists)

{

#write-host $List.Title

If($web.Title -eq "Rod Test")##comment out this line and the next if all updates##

{

write-host "Found Rod"

$webpartmanager = $web.GetLimitedWebPartManager(($web.Url + "/default.aspx"), [System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PersonalizationScope]::Shared)

for($i=0; $i -lt $webpartmanager.WebParts.Count; $i++)

{

$webPart = $webpartmanager.Webparts[$webpartmanager.WebParts[$i].ID]

$webpartmanager.OpenWebPart($webpart);

write-host $webPart.Title

$webpart.AllowClose = $false;

$webpart.AllowHide = $false;

$webpart.AllowMinimize = $false;

$webpart.AllowZoneChange = $false;

$webpartmanager.SaveChanges($webpart)

}

$web.Update()

$web.Dispose()

}

$site.Dispose()

Needed to find a value

2011-09-30T08:08:00.003-05:00

SharePoint can be soo entirely too frustrating sometimes. I think MS decided to try and use up all the GUID's in the world and also they wanted to make it as hard as possible to find anything in the database. I agree you should NOT be making any changes in the database EVER! Use Powershell or Designer or the browser to update sites. But sometimes you just have to find out how things are connected. I seriously needed to know what was linking to this one page. It was driving us nuts. Anyway, we knew the URL but we didn't know what was linking into it. Along comes the following SQL script. It searchs all of the content database or database you are attached to and finds the value you are looking for. GUID or string. First I searched for the URL or part of it. Then I searched for the GUID of that record and found where it was linking from.

So here is the SQL. I stole and modified from somewhere else on the web. Cannot for the life of me remember where. I would give credit if I could remember who.

--drop table #results

declare @SearchStr nvarchar(100)

set @SearchStr = 'myurl.com'

--set @SearchStr ='7asdfas8-2345-234e-888d-3adsfasd73ad'

CREATE TABLE #Results (ColumnName nvarchar(370), ColumnValue nvarchar(3630))

SET NOCOUNT ON

DECLARE @TableName nvarchar(256), @ColumnName nvarchar(128), @SearchStr2 nvarchar(110)

SET @TableName = ''

SET @SearchStr2 = QUOTENAME('%' + @SearchStr + '%','''')

WHILE @TableName IS NOT NULL

BEGIN

SET @ColumnName = ''

SET @TableName =

(

SELECT MIN(QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME))

FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES

WHERE TABLE_TYPE = 'BASE TABLE'

AND QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME) > @TableName

AND OBJECTPROPERTY(

OBJECT_ID(

QUOTENAME(TABLE_SCHEMA) + '.' + QUOTENAME(TABLE_NAME)

), 'IsMSShipped'

) = 0

)

WHILE (@TableName IS NOT NULL) AND (@ColumnName IS NOT NULL)

BEGIN

SET @ColumnName =

(

SELECT MIN(QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME))

FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS

WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = PARSENAME(@TableName, 2)

AND TABLE_NAME = PARSENAME(@TableName, 1)

AND DATA_TYPE IN ('char', 'varchar', 'nchar', 'nvarchar', 'uniqueidentifier')

AND QUOTENAME(COLUMN_NAME) > @ColumnName

)

IF @ColumnName IS NOT NULL

BEGIN

INSERT INTO #Results

EXEC

(

'SELECT ''' + @TableName + '.' + @ColumnName + ''', LEFT(' + @ColumnName + ', 3630)

FROM ' + @TableName + ' (NOLOCK) ' +

' WHERE ' + @ColumnName + ' LIKE ' + @SearchStr2

)

END

SELECT ColumnName, ColumnValue FROM #Results

SELECT distinct ColumnName FROM #Results

Thanks

Boy alone in a soccer field

2011-09-20T08:53:00.002-05:00

From blogpics

This little boy was out there all by himself. Just having a blast playing in the soccer field. He was sitting there playing in the dirt. Sometimes I think we forget that we don't need alot of toys to make us happy. A big wide open field and some dirt was all this little guy needed. Of course I am sure he would have been very happy to have a dirt moving tonka truck too. I mean boys need toys don't they?

Friday Night Lights

2011-09-18T11:28:00.000-05:00

Football Friday night in America. This scene was repeated in most american high school football fields this last friday evening. All over america. the scene was the same. The place to be was your hometown football field. It was the social event of the evening.

Needed a One up Auto Increment number in a SharePoint List

2011-09-08T15:42:00.006-05:00

Yep, Guid's you can have your Guid's We don't need no stinkin guids. Actually I needed a 1+ auto increment number in a SharePoint list. I read the blog post here.

http://dlairman.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/add-a-unique-auto-incrementing-column-to-a-sharepoint-list/

Kewl but not quite what I wanted. I wanted to search thru the numbers already entered find the largest and pick the next number up. See the thing is. My numbers need to be human editable. That is right the user needs the ability to override them. For various reasons the number might come from my system or another system. They will not be kept in sync so there we go. 1+ but human changible.

Turns out this wasn't nearly as hard as the blog post above led me to believe. The answers found there though eligant and comprehensive were not straight forward enough for me.

In the SharePoint List. Click Customize Form.

This will open InfoPath on your computer.

Click Data Ribbon

Click From SharePoint List

Make sure you have the right SharePoint site. Click NEXT

Select your current list NEXT

Select the field which contains the number you want to add 1 too.

Select same field in Sort by. Select Desc. NEXT

FINISH

Ok now go to that field in your entry form Select the field Right click and selection Text Box Properities.

In the Value for the Data Tab Default Value area. Enter the formula Max(Proj_x0023_) + 1 You can click on the fx button if you want it will help you figure out the formuale. Proj_x0023_ was the name of the field I created in the data lookup just a second ago.

Click OK and then publish.

There ya go.

DC Fountains

2011-09-04T07:00:00.000-05:00

Fountains all over DC. I might have pushed this alittle tooo far. But for some reason I really like it.

Have a great weekend everyone.

National Archives

2011-09-02T15:18:00.001-05:00

This was really fun. But unfortunately you cannot take pictures inside pretty much anywhere good. Oh well.

Stained Glass in the American Art Museum

2011-08-28T06:00:00.000-05:00

Stained Glass in the American Art Museum - Yep that is cool

Angel Carrying

2011-08-27T06:00:00.000-05:00

Pretty kewl Angel carrying someone to safety

Why?

2011-08-26T06:00:00.000-05:00

Why? - Why would you use a segway to get around DC? They cost an arm and a leg. And you just look weird on them.

House Chambers

2011-08-25T06:00:00.000-05:00

Old Capital House Chambers - They don't use these anymore. It is a big empty room. Remind me why we got tickets for this?

Do you need to find all the sites where permissions have been changed

2011-08-24T15:45:00.002-05:00

select scopeurl, (LEN(scopeurl) - LEN(REPLACE(scopeurl, '/', ''))) as slashcount from [Perms]

where (LEN(scopeurl) - LEN(REPLACE(scopeurl, '/', ''))) > 2

You might have to change the value for 2. But this will get you all the libraries or documents more than 2 levels deep that have their permissions set differently than the above sites. It works really slick. You just have to run this on the content database for the SharePoint Server. Specifically I was looking for any PWA sites that my users might be modifying security so that if a planned update might accidently change security I can then be forwarned with the places that I need to go verify.

Enjoy

Davey with Antlers

2011-08-24T06:00:00.000-05:00

Yep this is always fun.

Air and Space Museum

2011-08-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

Air and Space Museum - quite possibly the awesomest of the Smithsonian museum's. Though the Art ones were pretty good. The planes were awesome the rockets were cool. But the interactive kids area. That was the bestest. EVER! Anyway this picture was a 3 shot panorama with each panel being a 3 shot HDR. It took awhile to process and get just right. But I simply love this. Gives you some perspective on the 2nd Floor wing doesn't it?