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Drill Through Your Way
October 17, 2006 / No Comments »
One of the most useful features of the SSRS 2005 Report Builder is the ability to generate reports on the fly. As long as there is a navigational path in the model, the end user can click on a drillthrough-enabled attribute to see more details. This feature is officially called infinite drillthrough. Sometimes, the automatic drillthrough reports may get in the way. For example, there are performance implications when this feature is used with UDM as a data source. Or, you may need the drillthrough report to bring data from a different data source than the one the Report Builder model is built upon. To meet this requirement, you can wire up a custom drillthrough report. For example, let's assume that your model has Customers and Accounts entities where a customer can have one or more accounts. You need to define your own drillthrough report that shows the customer's account...
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ProgressTracker Bug
October 3, 2006 / No Comments »
Some late code changes to the ProgressTracker CRI sample featured in my MSDN Magazine article "Jazz Up Your Data Using Custom Report Items In SQL Server Reporting Services" have introduced a bug that causes ProgressTracker to ignore changes to the CRI color and border style whent the reoprt is rendered. To fix: Open the ProgressTrackerRenderer.cs (or ProgressTrackerRenderer.vb if you use the VB.NET version) Locate the Initialize() function and make the following code changes: //_progress.ProgressColor = Shared.GetColorFromString(LookupCustomProperty(_cri.CustomProperties, Shared.PROP_PROGRESS_COLOR, Drawing.Color.Salmon.Name)); //_progress.BorderColor = Shared.GetColorFromString(LookupCustomProperty(_cri.CustomProperties, Shared.PROP_PROGRESS_COLOR, Drawing.Color.Gray.Name)); _progress.ProgressColor = Shared.GetColorFromString(_cri.Style["Color"].ToString()); _progress.BorderColor = Shared.GetColorFromString(_cri.Style["BorderColor"].ToString()); 3. Close the Reports project (if it is open) and rebuild the ProgressTrackerCRI project to deploy the code changes. The net result of making these changes will be that the CRI will reuse the Color and BorderColor standard RS properties instead of trying to find corresponding custom properties in RDL. Thanks to Sorin Sandu for reporting this.
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And the MVP Award Goes To
October 1, 2006 / No Comments »
I learned today that my MVP award has been renewed. This will be my third year as an MVP for Windows Systems – SQL Server.
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Transcend T-SQL Limitations with SQL Server 2005 CLR Objects
October 1, 2006 / No Comments »
One of the coolest SQL Server 2005 feature is .NET CLR objects. When use wisely, CLR integration can solve many nagging problems with T-SQL. For example, you cannot pass columns from an outer SQL statement to a TBF even though it returns one row. Or, for some obscure reason, you cannot use dynamic execution (EXEC statement) inside a scalar –valued function. Yet, you may need to use the same scalar-valued function with an arbitrary column. In comparison, the sky is the limit about what a CLR stored procedure or a CLR UDF can do. Here is an extract from a real-life CLR UDF written in C# that returns the YTD aggregated value for a given measure: [Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction(DataAccess = DataAccessKind.Read, SystemDataAccess = SystemDataAccessKind.Read)] public static SqlDecimal YTD(int companyID, DateTime financialPeriod, string measure) { using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection("context connection=true")) { conn.Open(); SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(String.Format("SELECT SUM({0})...
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Office 2007 Business Intelligence Videos
September 27, 2006 / No Comments »
Microsoft has released several cool Business Intelligence-related webcasts that target the forthcoming Office 2007. The webcasts are taken from the corresponding breakout session delivered at the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006.
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The Many-to-many Revolution
September 25, 2006 / No Comments »
One of the major UDM enhancements that transcends the boundaries of traditional OLAP is flexible dimension relationships, including many-to-many, referenced, and fact relationships. Marco Russo, who helped me tremendously with my Analysis Services book, ha s just published a very comprehensive whitepaper (shall we call it a mini book?) about many-to-many dimension relationships. I had the pleasure to be one of the reviewers. For those who are not familiar with his work, Marco is one of the few people on this planet that has deep understanding and real world experience with Analysis Services since its early stages. Thus, this whitepaper is a valuable resource that discusses practical implications of the UDM many-to-many relationships. The real-life scenarios presented in the whitepaper unlocks the mysteries of this revolutionary OLAP concept. Don't forget to check Marco's blog and his SQLBI.EU website for more UDM insights. Great work, Marco, and looking forward to a...
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Long Lines
September 11, 2006 / No Comments »
You will probably never run into this issue unless you have very wide tables but here it is. If use the RS table region and the table has many columns and groups, the number of textboxes in the table cell can increase dramatically and exceed the maximum limit. This situation manifests itself with a rather cryptic error message upon uploading the report definition:[BC30494] Line is too longWhat's going on? SSRS compiles the report definition to prepare the report intermediate language which gets saved in the report catalog. If the N*M (where N is the number of textboxes in a table and M is the size of the textbox name) exceed 64K, the VB.NET compiler throws this error because a VB.NET source file cannot exceed 64K. The workaround is trivial:Reduce the number of textboxes in a table by removing columns and/or groups.Shorten the textbox names, e.g. instead of textbox1 rename to...
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Ampersands Gone Wild
September 11, 2006 / No Comments »
Thanks for the Geoff’s feedback on the discussion list, today I was able to demystify one of the SSRS-SSAS integration “gotchas” that has been pestering me for quite some time. Sometimes a report may need the Jump to URL navigational feature to open a parameterized OLAP report. Since the UDM member unique names contain & (to designate the key), I have been unable to find a way to construct a Javascript link that correctly escapes & in the report parameters, e.g.: ="javascript:void(window.open('http://localhost/ReportServer?/OLAP/Daily Product Sales&DateTimeIndex=[Date].[Time Index].&[2003]&SalesTerritoryGroup=[Sales Territory].[Group].&[North America]&rs:Command=Render’))"Here, the Daily Product Sales report takes two parameters (DateTimeIndex and SalesTerritoryGroup). As I mentioned in Chapter 8 of my book, even if you use the escape code of ampersand %26 (or the escape Javascript function), the browser will “helpfully” unescape the value back to & and the Report Server will choke. The trick is to use %2526 instead of just %26, as the...
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Jazz Up Your Data Using Custom Report Items In SQL Server Reporting Services
September 8, 2006 / No Comments »
As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the most exciting (but not well known and documented) extensibility areas of SSRS 2005 is custom report items (CRI). Read my latest article "Jazz Up Your Data Using Custom Report Items In SQL Server Reporting Services reports" published in the October issue of MSDN Magazine to learn how to implement a progress bar CRI.
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Cizer.Net Reporting 4.0 Released
September 6, 2006 / No Comments »
Cizer Software today announced the release to market of Cizer.Net Reporting 4.0 - a web-based report designer for Microsoft Reporting Services. According to the company "both Standard and Enterprise editions enjoy more functionality than ever before within the Cizer Quick Query module to allow enhanced formatting, with the addition of charting and logos, as well as the addition of Summary Reporting - all via point-and-click design with no knowledge of SQL required."
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