PerformancePoint Multi-Select Tree Filter Zoom Issue in Internet Explorer

Recently I needed to create a Multi-Select Tree Filter for one of my PerformancePoint dashboards. I’ve created plenty of List Filters against Named Sets, Member Selections and MDX Queries in the past, and I’ve even created my own custom textbox PerformancePoint filters, but until recently, I hadn’t had the need for a Multi-Select Tree Filter. For a new dashboard that I was creating, I basically needed a simple checkbox list to use as a PerformancePoint dashboard filter and the Multi-Select Tree Filter fit the bill perfectly. It was easy to create and it seemed to work well too, until I attempted a live demo of the dashboard to an internal group.

With the dashboard projected onto a wall and zoomed in using Internet Explorer’s zoom so that everyone could clearly view the dashboard, I expanded the filter, only to get something similar to the following:

 

 

A complete fail.

In the moment, I neglected to realize that it was IE's zoom causing the problem, although I quickly discovered that back at my desk. At 100% it displayed perfectly. As IE's zoom increased or decreased away from 100%, the list moved out of view either to the upper left or to the lower right, eventually, just showing the word "false". Setting a zoom level in Chrome worked fine (of course), which did help me in finding a solution rather quickly.

 

Using Chrome's Developer tools I found that one of the enclosing DIV elements that displays the dropdown was using the following filter:

 

.pps-tree-layer1 {
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(color=#333333,direction=130,strength=3)
}

 

Switching over to IE's Developer tools and disabling that filter, enabled the Multi-Select Tree Filter to display properly when zooming. A quick Google search for how to remove the filter via CSS yielded a blog post by Brian Johnson on How to Disable a CSS Filter in Internet Explorer. I applied that to the correct element as follows:

 

.pps-tree-layer1 {
    /* For IE 8+ */
    -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(enabled = false)"!important;
    /* For IE 5.5 - 7 */
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(enabled = false)!important;
}

and viola...

 

 



Zoomed and displaying correctly!

SSRS Beginner Tip: Generating PNGs from an SSRS Report (and PowerShell)

I recently had to generate a couple of dozen map images to be used by a client in their company website. The required map basically needed to be centered and zoomed on a sales territory boundary, highlighting it, displaying the trade areas within it and showing a Bing Maps background. SSRS wouldn't have necessarily been my first choice to create maps (MapInfo would have been), however I already had an SSRS report that contained this exact map. All I had to do was copy it and remove a couple of tables.

So setting up the SSRS report was pretty straight forward. In order to generate an image for each of the sales territories, I had to additionally create a Data-Driven Subscription, passing in the sales territory code into a report parameter. Again, pretty straight forward, until I realized that the only image export format available was a TIFF image file, which wouldn't work for the clients web page. They required a JPG or PNG.

The answer was to go ahead and generate the TIFFs using the subscription and then run this handy PowerShell script which would convert each image to a PNG:

#Load required assemblies and get object reference 
[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms");

$path = "C:\MapImages"

Get-ChildItem $path *.tif |
    ForEach-Object { 
        $i = new-object System.Drawing.Bitmap($_.FullName);
        # Save with the image in the desired format
        $i.Save($("$($path)\$($_.BaseName).png"),"PNG"); 
    }

This script loops through each of the TIFFs located in the specified path, opening them and then saving them with the specified PNG format with the same base name as the TIFF. Most of this tiny script can be credited to the Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog post Hey, Scripting Guy! How Can I Use Windows PowerShell to Convert Graphics Files to Different File Formats?