PerformancePoint Blog

Yesterday, a machine which had been happily creating PowerPivot snapshots for me stopped doing so. If I had taken the time to search on keywords like “PowerPivot”, “snapshot”, and “IE9”, I would have landed on Gavin’s blog and saved myself some time, but whatever…it was a good learning experience.

When the snapshot process kicks off, GetSnapshot.exe leaves a log file in the temp folder for the account under which it runs. You’ll generally find everything you need inside C:\Users\<account name>\AppData\Local\Temp, specifically a log file which is made up of a GUID and .INFO extension.

When I began troubleshooting, I found that the .info (log) file for GetSnapshot was showing this:

<SnapshotCaptureLog serverUrl=”http://server” workbookUrl=”http://server/PowerPivot Gallery/t1.xlsx” fileNameBase=”fabdb563_fe9d_420b_99aa_b726fda82161″ snapshotCount=”26″ timeout=”300″>
<Error>onXLFrameLoad::Error! document.readyState = interactive</Error>
<Error>onXLFrameLoad::Error! document.readyState = interactive</Error>
</SnapshotCaptureLog>

After the timeout period , the log expanded to this:

<SnapshotCaptureLog serverUrl=”http://server” workbookUrl=”http://server/PowerPivot Gallery/t1.xlsx” fileNameBase=”fabdb563_fe9d_420b_99aa_b726fda82161″ snapshotCount=”26″ timeout=”300″>
<Error>onXLFrameLoad::Error! document.readyState = interactive</Error>
<Error>onXLFrameLoad::Error! document.readyState = interactive</Error>
<Error timeout=”True”>System.TimeoutException: The operation has timed out.</Error>
</SnapshotCaptureLog>

I manually ran GetSnapshot using information from Mariano’s blog and pretty much saw the same thing.

One great thing about Microsoft is that there are a ton of people smarter than me – so I asked those smart people what they thought was going on and got a couple of responses right away (thanks Yinwei and Dave!).

Essentially, GetSnapshot uses IE frames and the IE Browser control to do its business (onXLFrameLoad::Error  Now starts making more sense!) so they suggested upgrading to IE9 on my web front end might be causing the problem. Sure enough, after uninstalling  IE9 and re-patching IE8, snapshot generation kicked right back in for me.