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Archives / 2012 / April
  • How to create a new report in Nintex Analytics 2010

    190 comments

    in this video I show you how to create a new report in Nintex Analytics 2010. I’ll show you:

    • how to select a dataset for your report
    • how to configure report parameters
    • How set the report name, description, icon and other properties
    • How to customize chart visualization
    • How to customize table visualization

    Written by vahid

    Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 6:35 AM

  • Nintex Analytics 2010 Out of the box reports-Sites&Pages

    166 comments

    in this video I walk you through the reports which are available out of the box in Sites&Reports category of Nintex Analytics 2010.

    Written by vahid

    Saturday, April 21, 2012 at 5:00 AM

  • How To Install Nintex Analytics 2010

    157 comments

    one of the best thing about Nintex Analytics 2010 is the installation experience. like other Nintex products, the installation experience is fast and easy. you just need to let Nintex Analytics know a few settings and it will take care of the rest.

    in the following video I’ll show how to install Nintex Analytics 2010 on your environment.

    Written by vahid

    Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 7:54 AM

  • How to trigger a Nintex Workflow from a Nintex Analytics report schedule

    1261 comments

    well we all know that Nintex Analytics provides a great insight to our SharePoint environments through the vast number of reports it provides out of the box.

    But how can we turn these information into some actions? the good news is that Nintex Analytics 2010 integrates well with Nintex Workflow which would enable us to make some decision and execute a set up process based on the outcome of a report.

    Nintex Analytics 2010 has got the capability to trigger a Nintex Workflow as part of report schedule. the report will pass all the information to the workflow and leaves it upto the workflow to take some action –if required- based on the data.

    for example there is report avaiable out of the box in Nintex Analytics 2010 called Content Storage by Site which displays total disk storage used by each site.

    image

    let’s say that in your organization a each site belongs to a department and IT department bills them based on their disk usage.

    to automate this you can easily create a workflow which generates and emails the bill for each department once the report schedule is ran.

    The workflow need to be a site workflow. so let’s create a Nintex Workflow called Bill Departments by clicking Site Actions => Nintex Workflow 2010 => Create Site Workflow. the next step is to define the variables that report will pass to the workflow.

    By default, the following five report columns will passed by the report to the workflow as a Workflow variable.

    · ScheduleInfo – The run schedule of the report e.g. Once per month

    · ReportID – The report ID

    · ScheduleStartTime – The start time of the schedule

    · ScheduleEndTime – The end time of the schedule

    · ExecutionID – The execution ID for the schedule that triggers the workflow

    And if you chose to run the workflow for each result, then report will prefix all the columns in the result with “ReportData” and passes them to the workflow as workflow variable. to find out what are columns available in the the report you can click the chart/table designer in the report design mode and then click on Data Settings tab. you will see all available columns in this tab.  for example our report has got the following columns:

    image

    If you chose to run the workflow for each result which we want so, then report will prefix all the columns in the result with “ReportData” and passes them to the workflow as workflow variable. for example the this report will pass the following parameters to the workflow:
    ReportDataSiteId, ReportDataWebId, ReportDataFiles, ReportDataFilesRelative, ReportDataSizeRelative, ReportDataSize etc..

    in this case we just need to use ReportDataSiteId and ReportDataSize. so we need to create a variable for each of them in the workflow:

    image

    Please note that, the name of the variable created in the workflow is case sensitive and should be ReportData followed by column name and NOT column display name.

    we can proceed and design our workflow using these two parameters. please note that the workflow will be executed per each record in the result which in this case is a site.

    once we are done with designing the workflow we need to publish it and make it ready to be triggered by the report schedule.

    let’s assume that you need to bill departments each month. so we would configure the report schedule to run first of each month

    image

    and that’s all we needed to do. next time the report schedule runs it will trigger the workflow for each record in the result of the report execution.

    Written by vahid

    Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 1:53 AM

  • Using Unity with ASP.NET WEB API Controller

    518 comments

    Support for Ioc containers is backed into ASP.NET WEB API and uses the service locator pattern dependency resolver by default.

    the default service locator implements the IDependencyResolver interface. This interface has two methods.

    • GetService: Creates one instance of a specified type.
    • GetServices: Create a collection of objects of a specified type.

    in order to use Microsoft Unity framework with ASP.NET WEB API we need to map these to methods to Resolve and ResolveAll methods of Utity. to do so first add the following method to your global.asax.cs or your bootstrapper class

            Public static void RegisterDependencies(IUnityContainer container)
            {
     
                GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.ServiceResolver.SetResolver(
                    t =>
                    {
                        try
                        {
                            return container.Resolve(t);
                        }
                        catch (ResolutionFailedException)
                        {
                            return null;
                        }
                    },
                    t =>
                    {
                        try
                        {
                            return container.ResolveAll(t);
                        }
                        catch (ResolutionFailedException)
                        {
                            return new List<object>();
                        }
                    });
            }

    this is the method which maps the GetService and GetServices methods to Resolve and ResolveAll methods.

    the next and final step is to plug in this method to the framework. to do so you just need to call this method from the method in which you construct your unity container. in my case I create a separate method to take care of this:

            private static IUnityContainer BuildUnityContainer()
            {
                var container = new UnityContainer();
                RegisterMappers(container);
                RegisterDependencies(container);
                container.RegisterControllers();
                DependencyResolver.SetResolver(new UnityDependencyResolver(container));
                return container;
            }

    and you are done. you should be able to use your Ioc container with ASP.NET WEB API now.

    Written by vahid

    Saturday, April 14, 2012 at 5:40 PM

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