Reporting Services Top 10 Wish List

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Reporting Services has gone a long way for the past five years and it’s getting better. In the spirit of the season, here is my Reporting Services Top 10 Wish List revised from three years ago. This list is based on my work, so your priorities may differ.

  1. Improved Analysis Services integration – Since its debut in SSRS 2005, the MDX query designer hasn’t changed. R2 continues the trend, so no hope until at least 2011, that’s six years! Yet, the MDX query designer has plenty of deficiencies and bugs to be addressed, such query schema limitations, poor support for parent-child hierarchies, parameter limitations, and so on. I use SSAS heavily in my real-life projects and have to battle these deficiencies on a daily basis. I think it’s time for Microsoft to poll customers and MVPs for feedback and improve the integration with SSAS.
  2. Eventing model – Although SSRS 2008 introduced a Report Definition Customization Extension (RDCE) that lets you change the report definition when the report requested, this extensibility mechanism was added as an afterthought and it’s somewhat kludgy. What’s really needed is server-side events, such as OnReportRender, OnPrint, OnParameterLoad, etc., similar to the ASP.NET programming model. Imagine the flexibility you will have as a report author if the server raises events for various stages of report processing and passes the report definition to let you evaluate conditions and change collections and RDL on the fly.
  3. Supported RDL Object Model – After promising an RDL object model at TechEd 2007, SSRS 2008 brought an unsupported version but R2 is on its way to “undo” it by making it publicly inaccessible. At the same time, there are many requirements that call for pre-processing report definitions. A supported RDL object model will definitely simplify this.
  4. Silverlight-based Report Viewer – Silverlight established itself as a platform of choice for web-based development. A Sliverlight Report Viewer will be a welcome addition.
  5. More interactive reporting – Currently, SSRS requires you to make design changes and preview them. It will be great if a future release blurs design and preview to support more interactive reporting similar to Excel PivotTable.
  6. Dataset enhancements, such as ability to navigate dataset rows and joining datasets at report level.
  7. More user-friendly ad-hoc reporting – Report Builder 2.0/3.0 is one my favorite features that SSRS 2008/R2 brought in. However, some end-user oriented features from Report Builder 1.0 got “lost” along the way. This item is about these features, such as making it easier for the end user to filter report data. When connected to SSAS, for example, SSRS should be as user-friendly as Excel.
  8. ADO.NET dataset binding for server reports – I keep on asking for this feature and I still think it could be very useful to be able to pass ADO.NET datasets to published reports without having to build a custom dataset extension.
  9. Report styling – Ability to style and skin reports.
  10. Decoupling the Report Builder Designer and exposing it as a reusable .NET control which can be embedded in applications.

 

Happy holidays!