Thursday, October 25, 2012

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services - The value of the Top property for the text box "Textbox1" is negative. Negative sizes are not allowed

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services - The value of the Top property for the text box "Textbox1" is negative. Negative sizes are not allowed

This happens to me quite often and it has kind of become so easy to resolve. Usually when I work on reports, I happen to click on a lot of objects (text boxes, matrices, etc). Oft times the mouse slips and some odd object somewhere moves slightly out of position. 

Before we continue any further, let me highlight that I've tried reproducing this error in "Microsoft SQL Server Report Builder 3.0" and fortunately the "Report Builder" won't even let me get away with the mistake. However things are a little bit different in Visual Studio.

Usually when you try to deploy a report from Visual Studio, you'd get an error message like "The definition of the report "ReportName" is invalid." When you try to preview the report you then get a more descriptive error message like "An error occurred during local report processing. The definition of the report "ReportName" is invalid. The value of the Top property for the text box "textbox1" is negative. Negative sizes are not allowed."


Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services - The value of the Top property for the text box "Textbox1" is negative. Negative sizes are not allowed


What you need to do is locate the "textbox1" in your report and make sure it's selected, then go to the properties. Look for the position property which actually lets you specify the distance of your object from the containing/parent object. Probably the "top" property is a negative size, maybe something like -0.00004mm or -2mm, whatever the case maybe, change that value to a positive number or just make it zero, anything but a negative number.



Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services - The value of the Top property for the text box "Textbox1" is negative. Negative sizes are not allowed

Thato Mantai

Saturday, September 15, 2012

AppFabric installation failed because installer MSI returned with error code : 1603

When installing SharePoint 2013 Preview on Windows 2012, the prerequisites installer fails with the error "AppFabric installation failed because installer MSI returned with error code : 1603". What's irritating about this error is that it's pretty generic and tells very little about what you need to know to get it fixed. It's a standard MSI error message. To add salt to the wound, the situation gets messier everytime you try to uninstall or reinstall.

I searched all over the inter-webs and some suggested yanking out the PSModulePath from the EnvironmentVariables, well I tried that and still no luck. In fact, I'd advice against deleting this variable. Rather keep it there, as there are other applications which might be referencing the same variable.

The issue here seems to be that the path to the PowerShell executable that's needed for the AppFabric installation was incorrect.

Enough talking, how do we fix this error?..

Well, as it turns that appending this path to PSModulePath (System Properties -> Environment Variables -> System Variables) entry solves the problem... %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\

All the best.

Update: 28 January 2012

Added a few graphics for simplicity...





Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration

This page has moved to http://thitos.blogspot.com/2013/09/could-not-load-file-or-assembly.html

A lot of articles have been written about this particular issue. It seems like a really big issue with all the errors popping up everywhere, but in all honesty, it's bark is worse than its bite. I'll update this post later with a few online resources which I've found very useful while trying to solve this error.

The error usually goes something like this...



Error: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Option 1

Open up command prompt with elevated permissions and run this command

RD /S C:\Windows\Assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration


In most cases you will get an Access Denied error. That is because w3wp.exe is holding onto the file. You will need to stop IIS and run the command again.



Option 2


1. After the installer fails disable the assembly cache viewer.
2. Go into the assembly and find the file Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration.dll
3. Copy this dll to the bootstrap location: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\SQLServer2008R2\x64
4. Remove the Powerpivot instance from the Program and Features .. SQL Server 2008 R2 Uninstall
5. Enable the assembly cache viewer and copy the Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration.dll into the GAC.
6. Run the installation process again to install the PowerPivot instance.






How to join a SharePoint server to an existing farm using PowerShell

$SQLServer = "myDatabaseServer"
$FarmPassPhrase = "myFarmPassPhrase"
$FarmConfigDatabase = "SP1_SharePoint_Config_DB"

$FarmPassphrase = (ConvertTo-SecureString $FarmPassPhrase -AsPlainText -force)
Connect-SPConfigurationDatabase -DatabaseServer $SQLServer  -DatabaseName $FarmConfigDatabase -Passphrase $FarmPassphrase

Initialize-SPResourceSecurity
Install-SPService
Install-SPFeature -AllExistingFeatures