This post will help you to get gnucash running with MySQL on OS X 10.10.

Background

I do the bookkeeping and accounts for a variety of small NFPs or charitable organisations. I recently moved my bookkeeping for these from a combination of Sharepoint (seriously) and SSRS and Excel in to Gnucash. I had been looking for a decent free app for a while and whilst there are some interesting cloud options (in fact there are a million options) I stumbled across Gnucash - a nice looking open source, cross-platform tool that would work on my Mac (without X11) and decided to go for it.

I continue to do some work in SharePoint 2010 which means I continue to trip over weird issues.

Issue 1: Error creating content type. A duplicate content type was found.

Matt covers this issue:

If you’ve gotten this error and come to this site looking for answers, chances are it isn’t simply because the name you’re trying to give a new content type is already in use. On the contrary, you are probably sitting there saying that you know without a doubt the name you are entering is not in use, and you have probably even pounded a random value out on your keyboard just to prove the point.

Read more

This event log error will occur in Sharepoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013 environments with SQL Server 2012 and SSRS in integrated mode. You will see either

“SQL Server Reporting Services Shared Service cannot load the SQLPDW extension. (Application: [service app name]. CorrelationId: etc.)”

or

“SQL Server Reporting Services Shared Service cannot load the TERADATA extension. (Application: [service app name]. CorrelationId: etc.)”

This link explains some of the reasoning behind it.

This error occurs because the Teradata extension is registered in the Reporting Services configuration file by default, but the Teradata assemblies are not shipped with SQL Server 2008 or as part of the .NET Framework. If the error message does not bother you, you can ignore the error when it is logged.

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There are a huge number of articles out there discussing how to create (semi-) dynamic list views or filters based on some volatile property like current time. For instance: “Show me all documents that were created today” or “Show me all documents that were created more than 7 days ago” or “Show me all in tasks due in the next three days”. The solution to this is some combination of a list view filter, or calculated column, and the use of a property like [Today]. (Note: There are a couple of key caveats to do with this.)

A limitation of this, however, is that the time portion of a datetime is ignored. So when I wanted to “show all documents created in the last 10 minutes” - I couldn’t. There were a few workarounds - various combinations of calculated columns, using SharePoint Designer and so on were available - but I was determined to find a solution that didn’t require any of this!

I’m posting this here as, despite using this all the time, I still find myself looking it up.

There are a couple of things you can do, in your Dev environment, to assist with debugging SharePoint and your custom solutions.

CustomErrors and SafeMode

This should only be used in a Dev environment, but you can disable the “friendly” error messages in SharePoint and replace them with full exceptions, and, if desirable, a stack trace.

You can edit the web.config for your application. Note: SharePoint has various web.configs spewed about the place, and for this to work, you need to edit the one located in

Using SharePoint Workflow (in fact, Nintex, but it applies to “standard” SharePoint workflow, after all, Nintex is just standard workflow with a few bells and whistles) on a document library and a workflow that is set to auto-start on document creation.

The symptoms were: if you add a document to the library, then the workflow fires, but it sits forever in a state of “starting”. However, if you manually start the workflow on the same document, then it runs absolutely fine.

If you try to deploy an SSRS report from Visual Studio to your SharePoint environment, where SSRS has been configured in Integrated Mode, using the built-in deployment mechanism, you may encounter a situation where you are endlessly prompted for login boxes, and no account details seem to help.

There is some useful info out there about what causes this - typically a mismatch where you’re using Kerberos authentication. There’s a good post and some resolution here.

When SharePoint goes bad: spurious error messages in the ULS logs that will lead you down a blind path. ULS logs were full of User Profile related errors, all saying moreorless this:

Exception occured while connecting to WCF endpoint: System.ServiceModel.Security.MessageSecurityException: An unsecured or incorrectly secured fault was received from the other party. See the inner FaultException for the fault code and detail. —> System.ServiceModel.FaultException: An error occurred when verifying security for the message

Spent a while looking through the UPS app config, Profile DB and everything looked normal. The issue is actually a “generic” WCF error - whereby the system clocks on the App Server (1) and WFE server (2) were out of sync by about 6 minutes. Manually setting the clock on the slow one to the current time resolved the issue.

I’ve been doing some work with dynamically populating a Managed Metadata term store using the API and data stored in a list.

The code was quite simple - check to see if a term existed, and if not, add it. The first pass of this routine would work fine, but then the second pass would crap out with an issue:

There is already a term with the same default label and parent term.

After a bit of debugging, I figured out it was falling over on a term that contained an & (ampersand) in the name. After a further bit of debugging (converting the character to HEX) it became apparent that it’s storing it as the wide (*pretty) rendition of the ampersand. And after some further research, it would appear that this is by design!

Tripped over this issue today. This post explains exactly what’s going on - namely that when using the OfficialFile web service (for e.g., records management), the 50mb upload file size is in place, irrespective of any setting the Web Application General Settings.

Fix:

1. Make sure that you have set the max file size on the web application
   Central Admin –> Manage Web Applications –> Select the Web Application –> General Settings –> Maximum Upload Size
2. Open the following file and edit on each SharePoint server:
   C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions14ISAPIweb.config
   Add the following section, then save and close
   <system.web> </system.web>
   

Didn’t even need to recycle the web services website/app pool. Perfect!