SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

Recently while working on a client deployment we had an issue relinking the SSRS reports to the data sources within the same library – SSRS was in SharePoint integrated mode. We had developed the Project Server solution internally and migrated it to the clients environment at a later date. All worked as expected apart from trying to relink the SSRS Reports to the updated data sources. The SSRS data sources had been edited to use the correct databases / PSI web services but when we tried to link the reports to the databases from the Manage Data Sources menu, SharePoint threw an error when trying to browse to the data sources. The error from the ULS log can be seen below:

Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.SharePointException: , Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.SharePointException: Report Server has encountered a SharePoint error. —> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.  
at Microsoft.ReportingServices.SharePoint.Objects.RSSPImpUser.get_LoginName()  
at Microsoft.ReportingServices.SharePoint.Utilities.CatalogItemUtilities.GetListItemUserLoginName(RSSPListItem item, String fieldName)

The cause of this error was that the user who created the SSRS objects had been removed from SharePoint when the system was cleaned up to take on to the clients environment.

There is a simple fix, that is to update the Author (Created By) and Editor (Modified By) fields with a user that exists on the SharePoint farm. The Author field can’t be updated via the UI but it can be update via the object model.

I created a simple PowerShell script that will update the author and editor for all SharePoint list items in the chosen list. To download the PowerShell script please see the link below:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Update-SharePoint-list-4e6272ab

There are some variables / settings that need to be updated before running the script, these can be found below:

$newuser = "support\paulmather"  This needs to be updated with the new author and editor’s user account.

$site = get-SPWeb http://vm353/pwa/ProjectBICenter This needs to be updated with the correct URL for the site that contains the list / library.

$list = $site.Lists["Test"] This needs to be updated with the name of the correct library / lists that contains the list items that need to be updated, in this example the SSRS items.

That is it, the script is then ready to run.

Please fully test on a replica test farm before running on Production.