26.10.08

Excel Services and PerformancePointServer 2007: issue with hyperlinks

Hello everyone,

last Friday I had the following task: create an Excel sheet, containing hyperlinks to certain document libraries of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) (installed and running on the server), publish this sheet to Excel Services (running on MOSS) to another library and finally view this published Excel sheet in PerformancePoint Server Dashboard (as a report of "Excel Services" type). While doing this, I have encountered the following issue: when you publish your sheet to MOSS/Excel Services, the URL entered
in the sheet (pointing to MOSS library) gets replaced by a dot ("."). For example, if you entered "hhtp://localhost/Documents/myXLSReports", then you get ".". If you enter "hhtp://localhost/Documents/myXLSReports/Forms/AllItem.aspx" (the page, which actually shows all library items in browser), you get something like "./Forms/Allitems.aspx". As a result, when you view your Excel sheet in a browser (as a part of dashboard or using Excel Services functionality), you cannot use you entered link as link, since there is no "http://" part saying browser "Hey, here is a link for you!".

I didn't find any explanation to this phenomena. Besides, I haven't found any way to prevent the links from being replaced. But one workaround (which works) is simple. Very simple: just upload your Excel sheet into library using the Web-interface of MOSS. In this case the hyperlinks remain as they were set and can be used in the browser.

I hope, this can save your time. On Friday I spent some hard hours looking for the reason and possible solution.

Cheers,
Andrey

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