Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET – Error executing child request for ChartImg.axd

I ran into this error today when attempting to show a web part on a SharePoint site that utilises the .NET 3.5 Chart Controls from MS (See link at the bottom of the post).

When the page opened it bombed out with the above error, some research found the following question on stackoverflow –

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/302820/net-3-5-chart-controls-exception-error-executing-child-request-for-chartimg-axd

To fix this error you need to add the following entry into the <HttpHandlers> section of the web.config file:

<add path="ChartImg.axd" verb="GET,HEAD,POST" type="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler, System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false" />

When I refreshed the page, I received another error – this time it was:

Invalid temp directory in chart handler configuration

If you too get this error then you need to make sure you have the following line in the <appSettings> section of the web.config:

<add key="ChartImageHandler" value="storage=file;timeout=20;dir=c:\TempImageFiles\;" />

Also make sure that the above directory ‘TempImageFiles’ exists on the C: drive or you can change this to any other directory that you like.

Hope this helps!

Download link for MS Chart Controls:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=130F7986-BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en

Pre-register for SharePoint 2010 beta

In case you haven’t seen this link floating around the web or on twitter yet then here it is:

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx

Simply head over the site and register, you will then be notified as soon as the public beta of SharePoint 2010 becomes available in November

SharePoint – The Trial Period for this product has expired error

I had this error message today when trying to create a report center site. After looking through the SharePoint logs I found the following lines:

Feature receiver assembly ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’, class ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler’, method ‘FeatureActivated’ for feature ‘22a9ef51-737b-4ff2-9346-694633fe4416′ threw an exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The trial period for this product has expired.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CmsSecurityUtilities.EnsureEvaluationNotExpired()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler.FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties receiverProperties)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.DoActivationCallout(Boolean fActivate, Boolean fForce) 

Feature Activation: Threw an exception, attempting to roll back.  Feature ‘Publishing’ (ID: ‘22a9ef51-737b-4ff2-9346-694633fe4416′).  Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The trial period for this product has expired.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CmsSecurityUtilities.EnsureEvaluationNotExpired()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler.FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties receiverProperties)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.DoActivationCallout(Boolean fActivate, Boolean fForce)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.Activate(SPSite siteParent, SPWeb webParent, SPFeaturePropertyCollection props, Boolean fForce) 

After some googling around I find the following blog post – http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/02/05/activating-office-sharepoint-server-publishing-infrastructure-access-denied.aspx.

Changing the application pool account worked and the site was created, although I did have a ‘File not Found’ error first because I had forgotten to enable the ‘Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features‘ feature in the top level site collection.

Hope this helps!

SharePoint STSADM backup to a file share

I have been configuring STSADM backups today on a few SharePoint & WSS WFE servers to backup to a file share. These have been scheduled using the task scheduler and some batch files.

I had read before that the service account running the SQL instance would need modify permissions on the on the file share (both Sharing and Security permissions), and I am sure this is how we have it configured for another server.

However when I executed the backup it kept failing with the error message –

Object objectName failed in event OnBackup. For more information, see the error log located in the backup directory. SqlException: Cannot open backup device Operating system error 5(Access is denied.)

I did some searching around and eventually came across this TechNet thread –

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/7a0100cf-f396-46e6-83e8-06bdb08b432e

It seems that modify permissions is not enough and that the SQL service account needs full control permissions on the file share. I changed the permissions to full control and hey presto the backup worked!

Hope this helps.

Quest Migration Manager 2.0 now released

Bit of a plug for Quest software here but their tool to migrate SharePoint subsite’s, site collections and content has now been fully released. This post is slightly late though as the official release was on the 6th August 2009!

The official page is here –

http://www.quest.com/migration-manager-for-sharepoint/

And this blog post by the quest team talks about some of the features –

http://sharepointforall.com/blogs/team/archive/2009/08/07/migration-manager-for-sharepoint-2-0-is-now-generally-available.aspx

Their previous version of the software was called the ‘Reorganization Wizard’, we ran into problems moving subsites around within our farm and this software came to the rescue.

I would urge you all to check it out as its packed full of useful functionality.

SharePoint solutions do not retract

I have had this problem on one of our servers for some time now and am still trying to figure out what causes it.

When you go to the ‘Solution Management’ screen of Central Administration and retract a solution (wsp) it seems to retract ok but the status of the solution remains ‘Deployed’. When you try and delete the solution in the GUI you then get an error saying that you must retract the solution first – but it is retracted!

To get round this you can run an stsadm command to physically delete the solution:

STSADM –o deletesolution –name ‘YourSolution.wsp’ –override

The override flag is needed to force the removal of the solution as SharePoint thinks it is still deployed even when it is retracted.

If anyone has any ideas of what the problem with the GUI might be or how I can solve it please let me know.

Hope this helps

Alerts not working after WSS Backup/Restore

Recently we had a problem with our WSS environment when we tried to move the databases from one SQL server to another. I used the standard stsadm restore option to restore the individual web applications &  site collections.

Everything appeared to work great and I re-deployed our .wsp’s until one of the users notified me that their alerts didn’t seem to work. I double checked their alerts on the site and they were set up ok – ‘Immediate’ alerts on a documents list.

When I tried to subscribe myself a new alert, I would receive the initial subscription email but not the actual alert.

I did a bit of digging around and it turns out there that there is a known bug when using stsadm or the GUI to restore a web application – the Timer Jobs don’t get restored! When I check the timer job definitions page in central admin I could only see timer jobs for those web applications that were created since the restore.

This is well document in Dave Wollerman’s blog –

See here:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/llowevad/archive/2008/02/18/workaround-for-creating-timer-jobs-after-a-restore-in-sharepoint.aspx

or here:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/llowevad/archive/2008/01/25/web-application-timer-jobs-not-automatically-created-when-restoring-from-sharepoint-backups.aspx

Now it seems there is a Post-SP1 hotfix available here that will fix the issue (KB941922) – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941422

I cannot confirm however if that hotfix works as I manually created the web applications again keeping the IIS sites & content databases, this then recreated the missing timer job definitions and hey presto the alerts stopped working!

Hope this helps anyone with similar issues!

WSS – OWSTimer error when performing Web Application restore

I had to rebuild our WSS farm recently and create a new configuration database so I needed to restore our web applications. I had taken a backup of the entire farm and decided to restore each web app individually.

When I used the GUI (Central Administration) to do the restore I received the following error:

Error: Object WSS_Intranet (89) (previous name: IntranetDev (80)) failed in event OnRestore. For more information, see the error log located in the backup directory.
SPUpdatedConcurrencyException: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object SPWebApplication Name=WSS_Intranet (89) Parent=SPWebService is being updated by svc_moss_sql, in the OWSTIMER process, on machine **Machine Name**. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict.

Looking in the error logs and event viewer didn’t yield any more information so I did some research on the internet. It turns out to fix it you need to temporarily stop the OWSTimer (WSS Timer) service. Unfortunately if you do this it means you cannot use the GUI to restore as this uses a timer job, so you will need to restore using the STSADM restore command:

e.g. STSADM –o restore –directory “\\servername\backupfolder” –restoremethod new –item “Farm\Windows SharePoint Services Web Application\Intranet”

In this case ‘item’ is the path in the backup tree to the web application you wish to restore – have a look in the central admin GUI to help find the correct path.

Once you run the command you should see the web application being restored, once it has been restored you can start the OWSTimer service again.

I got this info from Tom Meskens blog, see the original post here – http://ph-tom.blogspot.com/2009/06/owstimer-error-when-restoring.html, thanks Tom!!

Note: Be careful if you are doing this on a live/production server, be sure you know the effects of stopping the OWSTimer service as this will affect any running timer jobs including custom ones.

Hope this helps!

A WSS Nightmare!

Thought I’d blog post about the problems I encountered last night whilst trying to move our WSS databases to another SQL server, what I thought would take about an hour max turned into a 6 hour job!

I ran the PSConfig wizard and disconnected the server from the farm, I then gave the thumbs up to our DBA to move the config and content databases.

After these were moved I went to reattach the server to the farm again by running PSConfig, after fixing a few problems with SQL permissions I thought everything would be ok. Was I wrong or was I wrong!? I kept getting an error when the wizard was ‘Securing the SharePoint resources’ that it couldn’t copy some files to the folder ‘D:\Web Server Extensions\12’, in Particular the ‘Data’ Folder.

That got me totally flummoxed, the D: drive?? I couldn’t understand why SharePoint would try to copy its 12 hive to the D partition, we always had the 12 hive in the normal place on the C (System) partition. As it turns out, some IIS sites had been migrated from another server and the IIS files placed on the D partition so we had two inetpub folders (one on C and the other on D).

It seems that this is why SharePoint was trying to copy the folders to the other partition. After searching the registry I found lots of references to the folder D:\Web Server Extensions and attempted to change this to the normal 12 Hive. This did not work however and only caused more issues – so how did I fix it I hear you ask??

Well in the end I opted to totally uninstall WSS and re-install from scratch, upgraded to SP1 then reconnected to the farm. Hey presto all our sites were back and I just need to redeploy the solutions (wsp) packages again.

Lessons learned? – don’t migrate IIS settings/sites from other servers while WSS is installed, at least if you don’t know the consequences.

Hope this helps someone if you have the same problem :p

‘Fear’ of the SharePoint Content Databases

I have recently read a few interesting comments from people on the web regarding SharePoint content databases, it seems almost fear the prospect of delving in to the content databases.

I appreciate that modifying data in the content databases could mean that your warranty/support contract is no longer valid but for reading data I personally find it very helpful. I have created a number of SQL Reporting Services reports that read their data straight from the content databases and often this is a lot quicker than point the report straight at the SharePoint site.

I would be interested to hear peoples comments on this, it almost seems that because SharePoint is designed with a rich front end for the users that the backend databases should not be touched. One thing that is frustrating though is the way that SharePoint stores the data in the AllUserData table, each column in SharePoint is represented by a seemingly random name in the table – e.g. a field called ‘User Name’ could be ‘varchar1’ in the table. The number would increase for each column of that type.

Let me know what you all think…