Unreadable content was found in this item - PerformancePoint 2007 to 2010 Migration

This little chestnut caused me no end of fun, and there is not a whole lot out there about it.

The Problem:

When you run the Import PerformancePoint 2007 Content wizard, using a valid account to connect to SQL server, and a valid BI Center as the target locations (which the wizard very kindly automatically identies and selects for you), you still receive the following message in each section.

"Unreadable content was found in this item".

There are two possibilities for this problem:

When it happens to all sections of the import (data sources, indicators, KPIs, Report views, score cards, dashboards):

The likely reason here is that the server needs to communicate with itself using a web service URL, and the (cursed) loopback adapter check is on. For this to be solved, the server must be able to access the target web application (e.g http://myintranet.company.com) from the local machine. This is easy to test. Open your browser from the server and see if you can. The following steps will resolve this issue:

1. Remove the loopback adapter check using the following powershell:
   
   
   

   # Disable the Loopback Check
   #This setting usually kicks out a 401 error when you try to navigate to sites that resolve to a loopback address e.g.  127.0.0.1
   New-ItemProperty HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa -Name "DisableLoopbackCheck"  -value "1" -PropertyType dword

2. 
   

   Ensure that a host entry exists for the site, either by DNS (for already in production systems), or, if you are in testing, or don't have access to DNS, via adding the hosts entry to your hosts file at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, e.g.
   
   127.0.0.1 myintranet.company.com

References: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010setup/thread/306c59e0-c74c-4f37-9df3-2b1202cef54e, http://sptwentyten.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/disable-the-loopback-check-via-powershell/

When it only happens to data sources and scorecards

My problem continued to persist past the first problem above. On further investigation of the SharePoint ULS logs, you should see messages similar to:

Failed to look up string with key "Section2TitleResource", keyfile osrvcore. edb1db92-2bd9-4dab-b772-b3b36b293e99

Unreadable content was found in this item. System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException: The given key was not present in the dictionary. at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowKeyNotFoundException() at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.get_Item(TKey key) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPScenarioContext.RetrieveDataFromSessionState(String key) at Microsoft.PerformancePoint.ImportUtility.UI.WebPages.ScenarioPageBase.Page_Init(Object sender, EventArgs e) edb1db92-2bd9-4dab-b772-b3b36b293e99

Now, this might lead you to think that something has not installed correctly, as it is complaining about resource files, but like nearly all problems in SharePoint, it comes back to permissions, and user context. The key issue in my case? I had created my own web service application pool to run the PerformancePoint service application under. The managed account for the application pool was a low privilege account (not the farm account for example).

The key thing I had missed was, that I needed to run the following PowerShell to provide my service account with appropriate object access to run the wizard successfully.

$w = Get-SPWebApplication("http://myintranet.company.com")
$w.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity("dev\svc_PPServices")

To be fair, Microsoft do list this in technet, but as with so many MS articles, they fail to tell you why, or how to recognise when you have not done this step.

references: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748643.aspx