• 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...

  • 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...

  • 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.

  • 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."

  • BI Market Share Report

    August 28, 2006 / No Comments »

    The latest research by IDC shows Microsoft is ahead of the pack in terms of growth in the business intelligence (BI) tools market. Microsoft ranked fourth in the overall market share and had the highest growth (25%) for the period 2004-2005. The release of SQL Server 2005 and the acquisition of ProClarity (evaluated separately on the report) will most likely gain additional momentum.

  • Dundas Map for Reporting Services

    August 26, 2006 / No Comments »

    Tuning again on the Dundas wave, the same company announced the pre-release availability of the Dundas Map for Reporting Services 2005. Designed as a custom report item (new extensibility feature with SSRS 2000) the Dundas Map allows report authors to present geographic data graphically in reports. The Dundas Map for Reporting Services with be included free in the Dundas Reporting Services Dashboard Bundle alongside chart, gauge, and calendar controls.

  • Dundas Chart for OLAP Services

    August 23, 2006 / No Comments »

    If you are on a lookout for a web-based smart chart that can browse SSAS 2005 cubes, don’t look further. Enter Dundas Chart for OLAP Services! Despite the name (what’s Dundas anyway?), I really fell in love with this control after playing it with its demos for a while. The chart can connect to both server and local cubes. The attached image shows the Dundas Chart connected to the Adventure Works DW cube. The beauty of the Dundas Chart is that it’s more than a chart. It is a web-based OLAP browser. And it’s AJAX-enabled so the page doesn’t re-post as result of user actions! From an end-user perspective, authoring a chart is a matter of dragging and dropping dimensions and measures. The same experience as creating an OLAP-based pivot or chart report in Excel. Given the void left by OWC and the lack of Microsoft OLAP browser controls, the...

  • Timeout Quest

    August 16, 2006 / No Comments »

    I was on an interesting quest today. I had to troubleshoot why some long-running SSRS reports time out after a fixed period of time. An SSRS report can time out for at least three different reasons. First, the dataset query could have been set to time out (see DataSet Query tab). The default query timeout is 30 seconds. You can set the query timeout to 0 to prevent the query from timing out. Second, the entire report may be set to time out . By default (see the Site Settings page in the Report Manager), all reports are set to time out after 1,800 seconds (30 minutes) but the report timeout can be overridden at the report level by using the report execution properties. When the report timeout is up, the Report Server simply terminates the report. Finally, if your application calls down to the RS Web service to run...

  • Installing Reporting Services 2005 on Named Instance

    August 2, 2006 / No Comments »

    Here are the steps I’ve recently followed to install successfully SRRS 2005 on a named instance. Follow the steps in the “To Install Reporting Services Side-by-Side With an Earlier Version” section in BOL. Navigate to http://localhost/reportserver/. If you get access denied error to rsreportserver.config (or another folder/fiile), add the SSRS Windows Services account (e.g. NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) and the Web service (ASPNET) to the SQLServer2005ReportServerUser$<machine>$<instance> and  SQLServer2005ReportingServicesWebServiceUser$<machine>$<instance> Windows groups respectively. Try to open Report Manager. If you get an error that the Report Server cannot open a connection to the database, go back to the Reporting Services Configuration tool. Switch to the Database Setup tab. Select the Server Name and Database Name (ReportServer) and click the Script button. In the Create Scripts dialog, select the Grant Rights Script option.Type in the Web service account (e.g. ASPNET) in the User Name field and select the Windows User Account checkbox. Click OK to...

  • UDM Many-to-many Relations and "AND" queries

    July 31, 2006 / No Comments »

    Recently I got an interesting question about querying UDM many-to-many relationships. For example, in my book I demonstrated how you can implement an UDM model (Bank cube) that has a many-to-many relationship between bank customers and their accounts. That's because a customer could have more than one account and an account can belong to more than one customer (a joint account).   But what if you want to find only the joint accounts that are owned by any two customers?  The following query returns the accounts owned by Bob and Alice:   SELECT NON EMPTY {[Measures].[Balance]} ON COLUMNS, Intersect    (      Exists([Account].[Account Number].[Account Number], [Customer].[Full Name].&[Bob], "Customer Account"), Exists([Account].[Account Number].[Account Number], [Customer].[Full Name].&[Alice], "Customer Account")    )  ON ROWS  FROM Bank   The trick is to evaluate the sets over the hybrid "Customer Account" measure group which is actually a dimension table but plays a role of a measure group. The Exists function...

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