Build TreeView with XML data in PowerShell [Tip]

In one of my recent scripts I worked on, I had to visualize XML data in a tree view manor.

I achieved this by using the TreeView Windows Forms control and I think that the result is good and can be used as an example if you have to do something similar.

I tweaked the function and made it a standalone "XML Browser" script that is visualizing the XML document and if you double click on the element you will copy the Outer XML text to the clipboard.

In order to visualize xml you need to supply the path to it and the starting element. On the screenshot above I have a web.config file loaded and the starting element I want to visualize is "configuration". You can find the code and the example below. I hope you find it helpful!

Troubleshoot PowerShell Add-Type Load Error [Tip]

In the last couple of days I am working with a client that has a DMS solution based on SharePoint Server 2010. We inherited the solution so it has it's specifics. One of those little things (that make life exciting) is that they have fields with custom data types. 

I had to do a powershell script that will edit some document metadata. I had to update standard SharePoint native data type fields, but after updating the item in powershell I lost the values of the custom data type fields. I realized that I need the custom data type loaded in the powershell session. So I started to import some DLLs, in the order that I thought it makes sense as we do not have the source code of the solutions.This was fine until I received the error below:

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Add-Type : Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

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This error is completely generic and the only useful thing is that it tells us where we can find more useful information.

This simple error handling script turned out to be life saver for me as it showed exactly what the load error is and which dependent assembly I need to load first :)

The nice blue text is our LoaderExceptions property of the exception. I hope that you find it useful!

Get a quick report of the SharePoint Databases with PowerShell [Tip]

Here comes another useful PowerShell one-liner I often use.
It will give you a quick overview of the SharePoint databases with properties like: Name, Server(Alias), TypeName, Web application name, Web application URL, Site collection count and the Size.
The size is actually the amount of disk space required for uncompressed backup. It might look something like a script, but actually it is a long and simple one-liner. You can see it below, I have used grave-accent(`) escape characters to fit it better in the blog. You can see it in one line here. Instead of piping to Format-Table you can generate CSV by piping to Export-CSV and later work with it in Excel.

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Get-SPDatabase | Select-Object Name,@{Expression={$_.Server};Label="Server"},TypeName,@{Expression=`
{$_.WebApplication.Name};Label="WebAppLication"},@{Expression={$_.WebApplication.Url};Label="WebAppLicationUrl"}`
,@{Expression={($_.WebApplication.Sites | Measure).Count};Label="SC Count"},@{Label ="Size in MB";`
 Expression ={$_.disksizerequired/1024/1024}} |  Format-Table -AutoSize

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Get Application Pool Identity credentials[Tip]

In this short tip I am going to post a PowerShell one-liner from my list of extremely useful one-liners. It can get the the credentials of the IIS application pools identity.
I use it mainly in two scenarios:
  1. Imagine that you will do a remote work on customer where you have only temporary access and credentials. Many times the account that is provided is Farm Admin, has local admin permissions on the SharePoint boxes, however it does not have permission to use PowerShell against SharePoint(no Shell Admin). You can use this short PowerShell script and get the Farm account(STS is running under it), many times it is left in the local admin group and you can log in with it and do what you need to do. Not a best practice, but it is a massive time saver.
  2. Imagine that you are working on issue where you need to restart the User Profile Synchronization Service instance and you need the Farm account password. You can get it with this script.

In order to use it you will need to have local admin permission. I can confirm that it is working on IIS 7.5,8.0 and 8.5.

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Get-WmiObject -Namespace "root\MicrosoftIISV2" -Class "IIsApplicationPoolSetting" | Select WAMUserName, WAMUserPass

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Error when access Nintex Live Management page on fresh Nintex Workflow 2013 installation.[Tip]

Today I hit a strange issue with a fresh installation of Nintex Workflow 2013 with Nintex Live.
Nintex Live solution was deployed by the installer. However when I tried to access the Nintex Live Management page in the Central Administration I received below error.

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The resource object with key 'LiveAdmin_Page_Management_Title' was not found.

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If you have done everything correctly so far the solution is very simple.
Open SharePoint Management Shell as Administrator and launch the command Install-LiveService , test if the page is now available, perform IISRESET on your CA server(s).

Unable to set custom Data Refresh credentials for PowerPivot workbook in SharePoint

Last week one of our customers had interesting issue, they were not able to set alternative Windows and Data Source credentials for PowerPivot Scheduled Data Refresh in SharePoint.
The deployment is typical BI Farm based on SharePoint 2013 Enterprise SP1 and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise SP1.
Since I was unable to find information about this and I also think that the authentication and refresh of external data sources is always a bit tricky in the SharePoint BI world, I decided to share my solution.
In PowerPivot for SharePoint you can configure Scheduled Data Refresh, including the option to set alternative credentials. This empowers BI Experts and BI site administrators to set connection credentials without having access to Secure Store Service(SSS) or even know what SSS is. See how this looks like below.

There is a good article, that explains how to configure Data Refresh in PowerPivot, you can find it here.
The issue with the customer was that when they try to set alternative credentials they receive generic SharePoint error page and changes are not applied.
If you read the article I referred above, you will see that every set of alternative credentials is actually saved as target application in SSS.
If you search in the ULS logs for Correlation Id you get, you will find something similar to below Unexpected error:

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System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[System.ServiceModel.ExceptionDetail, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089]]: Access is denied to the Secure Store Service. Server stack trace: at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.ThrowIfFaultUnderstood .....
.......

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This error message actually indicates that PowerPivot application pool account does not have permissions in SSS to create target application for the new credentials.
My solution to that was to add the account as Administrator of SSS with Create Target Application and Manage Target Application permissions. After doing this it worked out like charm!

Start User Profile Synchronization with PowerShell [Tip]

This is something new I learned and decided to share it in this short tip.
So I was trying to help in a TechNet Forum question. The user was asking how to start Incremental User Profile Synchronization with PowerShell because she needed it to run two times a day. Now when you manually star Full or Incremental sync. a timer job is started named "User Profile Service Application - User Profile Incremental Synchronization". If you start this job manually from the UI or in PowerShell it will trigger Incremental synchronization. If you want to set the schedule for the Incremental sync. you go to "Configure Synchronization Timer Job" in the User Profile Service Application Management page. However you cannot set the job to run twice a day. Here comes the PowerShell.
Thanks to Trevor Seward I learned this alternative method to start User Profile Synchronization in PowerShell, it will let you chose which type the sync. should be (Incremental or Full) by specifying $true or $false argument for the StartImport method. Here are the snippets for starting Full or Incremental synchronization.

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$UPS= Get-SPServiceApplication | Where { $_.DisplayName -eq "<UPSA_DisplayName>"}
$UPS.StartImport($true)

## To Start Incremental Sync. use $false as argument for StartImport method

$UPS= Get-SPServiceApplication | Where { $_.DisplayName -eq "<UPSA_DisplayName>"}
$UPS.StartImport($false)

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At the end of the day it is just starting the timer job I mentioned above, but it may come handy for some powershell scripts.

Change the URL of existing SharePoint List/Library[Tip]

Let's say that a site admin has created a ShatePoint library (or a list) with name CrappyOldUrl. Then the user decides that this is not an appropriate name for his library. The user can easily change the Name of the library from the Library Settings and changes it to Nice New Library. However the url of the Library is still /CrappyOldUrl/ and he/she calls you for help to change the url to something like http://<yoursite>/Nice New Library/.

There are many articles that will tell you to use SharePoint Designer, Save the library as template and recreate it or something else. But you are lazy SharePoint administrator, for you here is a way to do this in PowerShell.

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$web = Get-SPWeb http://portal-2k8r2.ilabs.l/ ## the Url of the Web
$list = $web.Lists["Nice New Library"] ##Get by current Library Name
$list.RootFolder.MoveTo("/Nice New Library") ## Change the Url(relative to the Web)

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And here is the result. Be careful because the Name of the library may be changed as well if it is not the same as the new url.

In this case we are renaming the Root Folder of the library the original URL of the library in this example is http(s)://<WebUrl>/<LibraryRootFolder>.

However if you are renaming List it is likely that the URL of your list is http(s)://<WebUrl>/Lists/<LibraryRootFolder> in this case if you do not want to put the list in the Root folder and keep the .../Lists/... The code will be as follows:

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$web = Get-SPWeb http://portal-2k8r2.ilabs.l/ ## the Url of the Web
$list = $web.Lists["Nice New List"] ##Get by current List Name
$list.RootFolder.MoveTo("/List/Nice New List") ## Change the Url

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You can see current RootFolder with something like this:

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$web = Get-SPWeb http://portal-2k8r2.ilabs.l/ ## the Url of the Web
$list = $web.Lists["Nice New List"] ##Get by current List Name
$list.RootFolder

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See the value of property ServerRelativeUrl.

[*UPDATE*]: Check out a Video Tutorial of this solution HERE

Get Hidden Service Instances in SharePoint [Tip]

I am not sure if you know, but there are service instances in SharePoint that you cannot see in the UI no matter if you filter the "Services on Server" view by Configurable or All. You cannot see them even with the PowerShell command Get-SPServiceInstance. You can get "all" service instances by getting the property of SPServer object. Here is the PowerShell line to get them:

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(Get-SPFarm).Servers['<ServerName>'].ServiceInstances

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The state of the service, if it will be visible or not depends on property of the service instance object that can be True or False. It is the 'Hidden' property. Here is the result from my SharePoint Server 2013 dev. farm when I look for hidden service instances.

In the result you can see some services that are exception from the general rule and are visible in the UI like SharePoint Server Search, there are also services like SSP Job Control Service this is a very important service that is in charge for the configuration synchronization on the different servers in our farm and it is related to Application server administration service Timer Job, but this is a long story for our "short tip" post.

Download Farm Solution from the Solution Management[Tip]

This short post is from category "short tips". Recently I needed the actual solution package (.wsp) from one SharePoint 2013 Farm. Unfortunately the only thing we had was a Farm solution uploaded to the Solution Manager. Here is a short script to get the actual wsp package that is already uploaded.

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$farm = Get-SPFarm
$file = $farm.Solutions.Item('mysolution.wsp').SolutionFile
$file.SaveAs('c:\temp\mysolution.wsp')

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This should also work on SharePoint 2010.