Reporting Services Tracer

To make a humble contribution to open source, I’ve just uploaded the Reporting Services Tracer (RsTracer) project to CodePlex. RsTracer helps you trace the URL and SOAP traffic to/from a report server. Given the sheer number of Web methods supported by Reporting Services, you might find yourself asking which web method should you choose for the management task at hand and how should you call it? At the same time, it is likely that Report Manager or Management Studio already supports some aspect of the management feature you want to implement.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to peek under the hood and see what APIs Report Manager or a custom application calls? This is exactly what the RsTracer sample was designed to handle. RsTracer intercepts the server calls and outputs them to a trace listener, such as the Microsoft DebugView for Windows. RsTracer helps you see the APIs that a Reporting Services client invokes and what arguments it passes to each interface. It also intercepts the server response. Armed with this information, you can easily reproduce the same feature in your custom management application. You can use RsTracer with SSRS 2000, 2005, and 2008.

Enjoy!