A fix for the PerformancePoint 2007 Scorecard font issue

[Darren Gosbell]

The Dashboard Designer in PerformancePoint Server 2007 gives you the ability to set a number of the properties for the font of a given column in a scorecard including the font-family and the font-size. You can see these settings change in the designer and you can preview the scorecard and see how your scorecard will look when it is deployed.



I changed the font in the screenshot above to Wingdings so that you could easily see the difference. In practice this is probably not a typical change, but you might want to make the font a bit bigger or possibly use a font to get a sparkline in your scorecard.

However, when you actually deploy your scorecard to Sharepoint you will be greeted with the following:



The fonts are all reset to 8pt Arial, regardless of the actual settings you specified in the scorecard designer for the font family and size.

This took a fair bit of digging an may not make too much sense if you have not done a bit of web development, but I have isolated the issue in the screen shot below.



This is part of the markup for a scorecard webpart, showing just the parts that highlight this issue. Right up at the top you can see a DIV tag with the ms-WPBody style, this is the root of our issue. I have pointed out the TD tag a bit further down which is where the font settings from the scorecard are applied and then further down you can see a second TD and inside that is a DIV which contains the actual data for the scorecard cell.

The ms-WPBody style has an entry in the core.css which is part of Sharepoint and it applies a default font-family of Arial and a size of 8pt to any contained TD elements, the inline style that is specified in the TD at the column level gets overridden because of the TD wrapping the cell contents.

One fix for this issue involves deleting the section in core.css that contains the reference to ".ms-WPBody TD" but that is rather extreme. It could affect the look of other elements on your Sharepoint site and service packs and upgrades could undo this.

My current fix involves installing the jQuery SmartTool from codeplex then adding a custom content webpart with the following script to the page containing the scorecard.

* _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("fixPpsFonts"); function fixPpsFonts() { $(".ms-WPBody").removeClass("ms-WPBody"); }*I set the visibility property of custom content webpart to false and then exported the webpart and added it to the gallery so that I could easily add it to other pages.

It's not an ideal solution at the moment as I have to make sure to manually add the webpart if I ever re-deploy the dashboard, but I think it's better than the alternatives.

Ideally I would like to be a bit more intelligent and only strip off the ms-WPBody class if the webpart contains a scorecard, but because the scorecards are rendered asynchronously using - the scorecard does not actually exist at the time the script runs, so I'm not sure that it's even possible to implementing this without changing the PerformancePoint Server code.






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