Restore site collection within the same farm

We are aware that requirement can be of any form, it might be logically possible or not but when the requirements arises then clock start ticking and task assignment counter starts! :)

One of our users requested such kind of strange request that he wanted the backup of one of the web application to get restored in the same farm with different web application, I tried my level best to convince him that I can get this one restored in development/stage and not understanding the logic of same replica within same farm! But he seems to get this one done so I tried my research and started taking the backup by SQL console.

Backup completed successfully and now the turn of restore – keeping my fingers crossed! Let me tell you guys- you might have done so many backup-restorations across multiple farms but this seems to be unique.

Why unique? – Because you are restoring that backup within the same farm.

As soon as I hit the restore command-BOOM :) it got failed!

Resolution:-

Please refer this TechNet thread- http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/e61ddaad-e00d-42f7-8365-728e0b224811/how-to-restore-existing-sharepoint-site-collection-on-same-farm?forum=sharepointadminlegacy

As per this reference- It is not possible to create a duplicate site collection using Content Database backup method. This is because when you restore the content database backup on another empty database the site collection ID remains the same.

Because of this, even if you add the new restored content database both the content databases will have the same site collection ID and that is the reason why the central admin shows only one site collection.

Pretty straight forward to understand and the only possible way to accomplish this requirement are either by PowerShell or by stsadm.

Step –by- details:-

1)   Create a web application by the generic way either by central administration or by PowerShell

2)   By this way – a new database will be created which has an altogether different ID

3)   Take the backup of the main web application that you want to restore on new one by using PowerShell command- Backup-SPSite -Identity “http://amolsharepointgalaxy.com” -Path "E:\Backup\galaxy.bak"

4)   Restore the backup on to the web application that you have created in the step#1

5)   That’s it- you are done.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know, Thank you.

solution deployment stuck on deploying

Solution deployment is the task that we do on daily basis. This is the task in which SharePoint developer and administrator works in proper co-ordination.

Problem description-

I was deploying the solution in our production environment and faced some strange issue. When I add a solution using PowerShell command its says operation completed successful.

Add-SPSolution –LiteralPath "<file_path>\name of the wsp” is stored"

So the next stage is install solution, I executed the following command

Install-SPSolution -Identity "name of the solution.wsp" -WebApplication http://sharepointplanet.galaxy.com –GACDeployment

I checked the statuses of the solution in central administration->system settings->manage farm solutions and the status never changes from deploying.

By means of this article, I will try to share the resolution worked for me and possible recommendations you can try to resolve this issue completely.

Resolution worked for me-

It turned out that one of our servers on which we have stopped the timer service + World Wide Web publishing service due to patches incompatibility and it was waiting on this server to complete.  If you have more than one server in your farm ensure that the SharePoint TIMER services are running on all.

How you can check the above-

1.   On any server->start->run->services.msc->enter->this will open the services console.

2.   Now type s-> this will give you all the services that start with S->look for SharePoint timer service and make sure it’s in started mode.

3.   This service should be started on all the front ends as well as application server.

Possible Resolutions-

1.   Make sure SharePoint timer service should be started on all the servers (web front ends as well as app server)

2.   Try restarting the SharePoint Administration service on all the servers.

3.   Restart all the SharePoint servers

4.   Make sure that all the servers in farm are on the same time zone.

5.   Execute stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs on all the servers of the farm

6.   Cancel the deployment job by means of central administration, remove the solution and try to add the solution again & check the results.

7.   Check the status of the jobs by means of CA-timer job status or use te following command - stsadm -o enumdeployments   - This will give you the list of all the pending & active deployments.

After trying all the steps, nothing works then please checks the logs and find out the root cause.

In case of any problems with respect to logs then please share here so that I can help you out!

I hope the above information will be helpful to deploy the solution successfully. Thank you.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know, Thank you.

Product applies to-

1)   SharePoint Server 2010

2)   SharePoint Foundation 2010

3)   SharePoint Server 2013

4)   SharePoint Foundation 2013

Code blocks are not allowed in this file + Performance Point

What is performance point service (PPS)?

PerformancePoint Services is a performance management service that you can use to monitor and analyze your business. By providing flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, scorecards, reports, and key performance indicators (KPIs), PerformancePoint Services can help everyone across an organization make informed business decisions that align with companywide objectives and strategy.

Functionality: Scorecards, dashboards, and KPIs help drive accountability. Integrated analytics help employees move quickly from monitoring information to analyzing it and, when appropriate, sharing it throughout the organization.

One of our users raised a ticket by mentioning “facing problem while using performance point service w.r.t. BI dashboards. Further probing reflected the fact that he was using site with BI template with PPS activated features.

So far so good but while opening the site i.e. PPSSample.aspx, he was getting the following error message-

An error occurred during the processing of /PerformancePoint/Pages/ppssample.aspx. Code blocks are not allowed in this file.

Further checks provided more details that ppssample.aspx page is by-default one and not a customized. You will find this under every web application’s site collection. Previously I thought it might be web application specific but I was able to reproduce it across all web apps so it’s a farm wide issue.

One thing we need to understand that there is nothing wrong in your activated features or enabled performance point functionality. Also, not all the users use PPS functionality so you need to take the decision very carefully w.r.t. following troubleshooting.

Resolution:

(neat and simple)- 2 step resolution:

Placed this in the web.config file of the web application within the <PageParserPath> header.

1)   <PageParserPath VirtualPath="/BI/Pages/ppssample.aspx" CompilationMode="Always" AllowServerSideScript="true" />

2)   IISRESET

That’s it- Your issue will be resolved.

Note: I mentioned about decision (refer the underlined keyword) - here is the fact- Thanks to Justin Kobel’s article  who have stated- “the page parser solution both open up a huge security hole within the page (allowing server side code to be authored within SPD and executed within your page), as well as causing issues in a farm scenario (trying to keep all of your web.config’s in sync, causing recovery issues, etc.)”

So the alternate solution which is little bit tricky and need SPD.

Here are the references:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh697481.aspx

http://oszakiewski.net/eric/performancepoint-error-code-blocks-are-not-allowed-in-this-file

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know. I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issues, thank you.

Product applies to-

-SharePoint Server 2010

-SharePoint Foundation 2010

-SharePoint Server 2013

-SharePoint Foundation 2013

Error communicating with Excel Services Application - Event ids 5231 5239 5240

SharePoint monitoring is very necessary and should be done on regular basis as it will give complete idea about any exceptions/errors/if any services are not running/if any servers are not responding etc. so while monitoring the servers, I came these following errors in the event viewer-

Event 5239 (Excel Services Application) of severity 'Error' occurred 10 more time(s) and was suppressed in the event log

Event 5231 (Excel Services Application) of severity 'Error' occurred 10 more time(s) and was suppressed in the event log

To verify this, I tried opening excel dashboards on each servers (WFE’s) to find out which server is the culprit. Before doing this, make sure that excel service application is in started mode as well as app pool is running.

Coming back to dashboard point, you will find the culprit server. Just restart that specific server and check the results. In my case, it fixed the issue and reference is as below:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee513104(v=office.14).aspx

The above article will be indeed helpful in many scenarios as-

1.   Delayed load times for workbooks.

2.   Workbooks fail to load.

3.   This event appears in the event log: Event ID: 5231 Description: Unable to reach Excel Calculation Server <URL of machine> [Session: <session ID> User: <username>]

Possible resolutions-

1)   Restart excel calculations services

2)   Recycle app pool

3)   Make sure that the account you are using for excel calculation service is working properly i.e. not locked!

4)   Reboot the server

I hope the above info is helpful and will give some directions to resolve the issue.

If you have any queries/issues regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know, Thank you.

Unable to save site as template + unexpected error has occurred

Here we go, it’s been a long time I didn’t publish an article which consist of hardcore troubleshooting! Yes, you are correct. It took some time to resolve but finally the issue has been resolved. This time it’s regarding problem occurring while ‘save site as template’ and how we found the culprit.

Problem description:-

User has raised the problem ticket by mentioning “facing problem while saving the site as template”, additionally the templates are getting saved in the solution gallery but not able to activate it also.

Error message:-

An unexpected error has occurred.

Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Correlation ID: acd95f50-4049-4625-9682-aa93aded118f

Troubleshooting done:-

Further debugging in the SP ULS logs and we found some strange facts which are based on event receivers- please refer below-

SPSolutionExporter: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Feature definition with Id 77658379-50ff-4e1e-a431-5652bee07a87 failed validation

Looking for 'ReceiverAssembly' attribute in manifest root node for solution

Looking for 'ReceiverClass' attribute in manifest root node for solution

The 'Format' attribute is invalid - The value 'CheckBoxes' is invalid according to its datatype

I debug further to find out where the problem is-

I downloaded the saved wsp's from  /_catalogs/solutions/Forms/AllItems.aspx to my desktop

Renamed it to .cab

Extracted all the contents and found some interesting facts along with manifest.xml file like-

1.      List Instances

2.      Modules

3.      Property bags

4.      web template

Inside List Instances, I found ElementsFields.xml

Once i opened the above xml file, search for the checkboxes and found the following-

Further exploration on this, it seems that the checkbox attribute is invalid and needs to be modified.

Resolution:-

After this one, the solution is pretty much simple, just go ahead and remove that affected column / remove the affected content type – does not require IISRESET also.

If you have any queries/questions regarding the above mentioned information then please let me know. I would be more than happy to help you as well as resolves your issue, Thank you.