As you probably know, when the RS Windows-based security doesn’t meet your requirements, you can replace it with custom security. Not many products out there allow you do this. In hist blog, Russell Christopher explains how you can use the Whidbey/2.0 SQLMembershipProvider with custom security.
Courtesy to the Marco Russo’s blog, I’ve learned that Microsoft released a KPIUtil tool for Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005.The tool allows users to export KPIs from both a Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 server and a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services server.
Please feel free to add to the list and happy holidays!
My book Applied Analysis Services 2005 is printed and shipped to the distributor. The paper copy can be purchased from the distributor website. Hopefully, it will make it to retailers (Amazon, B&N, etc.) by the month’s end.
Happy data analyzing!
There was an interesting post on the Reporting Services public newsgroup about an issue with the RS 2005 ASP.NET Report Viewer and custom assemblies. In a nutshell, the issue was that if you want to invoke a custom assembly from the ASP.NET Report Viewer, you need to deploy it to GAC.
Because of a bug in the RTM version, copying custom assemblies to the web app bin folder will not work. This bug will be fixed in a service pack. Currently, for web applications, you have to copy custom assemblies to GAC. This issue doesn’t apply to the WinForm version of the Report Viewer. In the case of WinForms apps, custom assemblies can be in the same directory as the application’s .EXE file; no need to copy to GAC.
An example of how the WinForm version of the Report Viewer can be configured to work with custom assemblies can be found on the Report Viewer home page. This page is maintained and monitored by the Rajeev Karunakaran, a Program Manager for the Report Viewer controls.
The RS 2005 Report Builder can automatically create a semantic model from an SSAS 2005 cube so your end users can generate ad hoc reports. However, it turns out that some of the SSAS 2005 features are not supported by design. More information can be found in this KB article.
If you install RS 2005 and the default web site has a web.config file that uses the new ASP.NET 2.0 themes feature, when you attempt to run the Report Manager, you will get:
Theme <theme name> cannot be found in the application or global theme directories
The reason for this error is that the styleSheetTheme element in the root web.config is automatically inherited by the nested web.config files. This error is not RS-specific. It happens with any nested web site because ASP.NET attempts to located that folder and apply it to the nested web site. To fix the error, break the inheritance chain by changing the styleSheeTheme in the nested Report Manager web.config file, as follows:
<pages validateRequest=”false” styleSheetTheme=””/>
The source code for my book “Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005” is available for download. It can also be downloaded by clicking on the Source code link found on the book resource page. To get the entire code, download the amas_all_code_in_one.zip fle. Alternatively, to get the code for a given chapter only, download the corresponding zip file.
Happy holidays!
WindowsITPro invited me to deliver a web seminar about RS 2005. Instead of picking up a particular area and focusing solely on it, this time I will be going for a “tips and tricks” type of session which will cover new ways to do things that were difficult if not impossible to implement with RS 2000. The topics will cover the three phases of the report lifecycle – authoring, management, and delivery. Unfortunately, due to technology constraints, I won’t be able to share my desktop and do live demos. Anyway, I think it is going to be an exciting session. I hope you will be able to make it.
In case you missed this little gem, RS 2005 comes with a brand new XML Extension which allows you to report off an XML data returned from an URL-addressable resource, such as an ASP.NET page or a web service. For example, suppose that you have a web method called GetOrders that return the customer orders as a typed dataset (table in my case) and has the following signature:
[WebMethod]
public CustomerOrders.SalesOrderHeaderDataTable GetOrders(int customerID)
You can create a report from the returned dataset by using the RS 2005 XML dataset extension:
<Method Namespace=”http://tempuri.org/” Name=”GetOrders”/>
<SoapAction>http://tempuri.org/GetOrders</SoapAction>
<ElementPath IgnoreNamespaces=”true”>GetOrdersResponse/GetOrdersResult/diffgram/DocumentElement/SalesOrderHeader</ElementPath>
</Query>
Unfortunately, the documentation stays shy about all the parameters supported by the XML extension but it is fairly easy to deduce what’s going on here.
The Method element describes the web method to be called. This is somewhat redundant since the SoapAction element does the same and explained in more details here. The ElementPath describes the full XPATH to the elements to be retrieved and flattened in a two-dimensional resultset. Finally, the IgnoreNamespaces attribute tells the XML extension to ignore any schema namespaces when parsing the XML content.
4. To pass a parameter(s) to the web method, use the Parameters tab and link the report parameter to the query parameter as usual, e.g:
Name Value
customerID =Parameters!CustomerID.Value
One cautionary note that bit me really bad is that the parameter name is case-sensitive and must much the argument name of the web method verbatim. Thus, if you change the parameter Name to CustomerID, you will find out that the XML extension doesn’t pass the parameter value.
Thanks for to the XML Extension, in my cases, reporting off XML data from URL-addressable sources may not require a custom data extension with RS 2005. Happy reporting!
