I want to add some OSIsoft RtWebParts to a Sharepoint page. I want these trends to be shown in different timezones for different users. What I'm finding is that they are always shown in EDT.
Ideally, I want a solution for configuring the presented timezone by page or by user.
Michael,
I am the product manager at OSIsoft for RtWebParts.
The time zone is controlled by the SharePoint site, not the web server. One possible workaround it to create a SP site for each time zone that you would like to support. Unfortunately, you would then face the challenge of maintaining the content for multiple sites.
I would also like to make a correction to the workaround that is described above. The workaround should use the RtActiveView web part(which uses ProcessBook .pdi files), not RtGraphic (which uses ProcessBook .svg files).
Thanks,
Tamara
The official response from OSIsoft is: this cannot be done.
RtWebparts objects always use the timezone of the Sharepoint site hosting them. Period.
Other than spinning up a new sharepoint site for each timezone you care about, there is one unappealing workaround:
Create your display in ProcessBook wherein you configure the time offset as desired
Include the ProcessBook PDI file within an RtActiveView web part
Repeat for each timezone
You're still stuck with one timezone (set in the SVG) but now at least you can get multiple timezones without multiple servers.
Related
I'm looking into upgrading a .net 2.0 app. The app is used by the public authorities of a certain city to keep track of expenses and generate reports and forms.
The reports and forms were generated in VS2005 using Crystal report. They follow a well defined layout, like official documents usually do.
I am looking at options to upgrade the application and the main problem I have is in determining how to deal with the crystal report files.
I have successfully upgraded to VS2008, but any version after that doesn't have CR anymore, so my company would have to pruchase CR separately and because the client and my company are both tight, I'm looking at alternatives...
The obvious one is using SSRS. I have never touched it before in my life, but after playing around with it for a bit, I get the impression that it is not very well suited to generating forms with lots of non-tabular content and lots of formatting. Or am I wrong?
It seems that every line has to be drawn separately. There is no (that I can see) accurate way of positioning lines for formatting...
But I'm just a beginner, so I might be getting this all wrong?
If that is the case, are there any other alternatives to CR and SSRS?
I was thinking of maybe having a separate MVC web site project in the solution. Have that generate the layout in html and css with data from my entity model, then view the result in a (built-in or not) web browser. Am I overcomplicating on this?
I really need advice from somebody who's done that kind of thing before.
What SSRS is good for:
Talking to SQL Server, much faster than other products as it in many cases retains the database better when in other programs IMHO they repeat query at times.
Designing collapsable grids and chart objects from datasets. You can have 'groups' that can nest aggregates of collapsed values and can be un collapsed or collapsed on demand based on expressions, parameters, or a recusive parent set.
A web service for deployment ease where you can deploy one or many objects. You can also write add ons for this service with C# and the ReportingService.asmx web service.
You can talk to the web service directly in a 'form' object in HTML and manipulate it's output.
You can schedule reports to send out via email and file saves automatically to clients or internal users.
What SSRS IS NOT GOOD FOR:
It is not event driven hardly at all except for parameters. You cannot click on many things and get other parts on the form itself to update. You may do an 'action' that goes to another location, report, or site. But in essence you are calling a seperate object, not the same instance again.
Multiple layers of reporting. Beyond tweaking tool tips you cannot do 'hover over' reporting without hacking SSRS. You can make javascript windows show other reports but it is not baked in to SSRS. So you are either clicking into new reports or tab stops in a report but not getting hover over quick objects beyond text and expressions that are in tool tips.
What do you want before considering what you need to impement?
I want to input and export things while talking to my database - ASP.NET with potentially HTML 5 or MVC4 if you want to be very new. ASP.NET is made for actively talking to a server and taking commands IN as well as OUT.
I want a form to auto update periodically on a page as a landing site and dashboard - AJAX and Javascript on top of HTML, Java or ASP.NET.
I want to create reports that exist on a Server and can be hosted on a wide variety of platforms in .NET via web service calls - SSRS.
SSRS's biggest selling point to me is it's reusability once you dial a report in. They are pretty easy to create, easy to configure, easy to deploy, and if you get a little advanced in calling the webservice you can get SSRS report objects in other technologies if you want.
There is Crystal reports for VS2010 and VS2012. It is just not shipped with them. You can download the installation from here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824
I am running through the same decision process at this time. There is a .NET product from a company called "Windward" that will allow you to design your reports in Microsoft Office. If you are in the MS ecosystem already or want your users to design reports instead of always calling on you, this might help.
Their template design tool is called AutoTag and you can deploy these template to their .NET based engine in a few lines of code.
I know the question is regarding SSRS vs. Crystal comparison but thought you should know there are other alternatives and some can make life easier
Ryan
I'm doing an intranet which will not be accessible from outside the company's network and they want to display in Plone some nice statistics about file downloads and pages most viewed.
With the network constrain I can not use google analytics or any sort of external service, so is there any product that allows to count file downloads and pages viewed?
I've seen an idea on uservoice regarding file downloads, and maybe I could extend plone.piwik.now to get page view statistics but I have a hard time thinking that Plone doesn't have any product that (maybe partially) suits this use case.
Any tip?
Essentially, you've two options, you can use one of the existing HTTP log analysis tools and scrape the information you need from those reports, or you can write a custom analytics tool in Plone.
We're currently working on a version which we plan to release as open source later this year. Essentially the patterns we're using is that we have a small javascript which passes parameters to our lightweight logging app. We're than able to show results from the reporting app like "top downloads" in portlets, even filtering by section and keyword.
I don't know about Plone add-ons (nor do I understand why you'd want to use a Plone add-on to do this) but Webalizer and/or http://awstats.sourceforge.net/ are two of the most popular choices.
I'm looking at the architecture for a DW project and there will be the need for some manual collection of [structured] data eg the monthly accounting results from a country manager where they need to complete a form and fill in half a dozen values etc.
I really like the idea of using SP and InfoPath for this as it gives the security, the workflow and the customisability etc that mean it can be easily deployed as the client already has SP rolled out. The bit I am less clear on is how, technically, we might interface to the SP workflows and the forms themselves. Ideally the data would end up dropped into a database and we would use our [their!] standard ETL (DataStage, possibly sat on a linux server) via ODBC and pick it up like any other datasource but I am not sure what this requires on the SP side. The alternative would be to get at the XML of the individual forms and pull the info from there.
Are these appaoches feasible? What would need to be set up on the SP side in order to make this integration as robust and seamless as possible? Can anyone point me at docs/reading matter that might give me some more background info?
Thanks,
Dex
First up, accessing sharepoint's databases is never the answer to any integration question. You should treat it as a black box.
So, how should you get the data? Web Services + HTTP. SharePoint offers a large amount of Web services to get at the data you need. If you're working with IP forms, then ultimately you will need to grab the resultant XML file from the document library and parse it to get the data you need. The Web services can be used to enumerate the IP forms, and you can use straight HTTP to grab to xml file. This is probably the approach that would be offered by most experienced sharpepoint people.
I would like to know the creation date and time of all Web Applications in a SharePoint farm. But after studying the SDK and inspecting SPWebApplication objects with SharePoint Manager it looks like this information is not available! Can you confirm this or do you know a way of obtaining these metadata?
I'm not aware of such a property for a web application. Two alternatives come to mind:
Look at the Created property on the root SPSite's RootWeb, or even look for the earliest date across all site collections' subwebs. Not exceedingly reliable.
Use IisSettings to check the creation date of the IIS sites' folders on the file system. It seems to me this should be pretty reliable as long as the server was part of the farm when the web app was created.
I am working on a project that is replacing an old portal system (Plumtree) with sharepoint and we want to make the transition as smooth as possible.
One thing we are look at currently is taking all the gadgets (Plumtree term for WebParts) and making sure they appear in the same place on the users new MySite.
Plumtree holds this information in a simple table containing the user, page, gadget and position information. I want to find a way to automate reading this table and putting the new WebParts on the users MySite and not have to manually set it up for hundreds of users.
I'm told modifying Sharepoint tables in SQL Server directly is not a good option as it may affect our support arrangements, but if it saves doing this by hand then I would concider it.
Other options that spring to mind are creating a equivalent table and using API calls to load the WebParts the first time the user accesses their MySite.
Any better suggestions?
You are right, messing directly with databases are not supported nor recommended.
Unfortunately, there are not much ways to modify MySites, the best way I know come from the MOSS Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/22/customizing-moss-2007-my-sites-within-the-enterprise.aspx
The way we did it was pretty much what is described in the link above (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/22/customizing-moss-2007-my-sites-within-the-enterprise.aspx).
Your best bet is probably to staple a Feature to MySite creation and have it poll the plumtree database, find the gadgets for that user, and add a 'Page Viewer' web part for each, pointing to the gadget's location. That said, you may want to reconsider blindly migrating all your plumtree gadgets into SharePoint. There may be much better 'SharePointy' ways to provide the functionality that your gadgets are currently providing.