Images. They can make your reports look great, but sometimes they are a bit tricky to show where you want, and when you want. Even something as simple as showing an image or not, or showing a different image based on the condition of some data.

Well, it might not be rocket science (or rocket engineering) but its not exactly well documented, so here are a couple of real world examples of how to handle images in your reports.

Showing/Hiding Images

First of all this is how to show or hide an image in a table, based on the condition of filed in your data set. This could be used to indicate (for instance) if an order is stopped. The first thing to do is add an image holder into your table. When you drag the image holder onto the cell of the table the image wizard will open. Follow the Wizard through and embed the image in your report. When its done you will see the image in the table cell.

Now, on the properties of the cell, drop down the Visible -> Hidden property, and click in Expression in the list, this will open up the expression editor. In here we are going to use an IIF statement to check the condition of one of our fields. We can then set the Visible state to true or false depending on the outcome. The statement will look something like:

=iif(Fields!Stop_Stat.Value = “Stop”, False, True)

With this now in place, when you run the report it should now only show the image when the value of Stop_Stat is true.

There has been a new beta version of Spiceworks 2 released this week, so i’ve decided to put it to the test and see if the improvements are as good as they are

I am going to look at a couple of areas for the test:

• Hardware Inventory scanning. Is it any quicker and does it recognize all the devices?
• Software Inventory scanning. Does it find all the software you expect, and does it know how to classify it
• Is the interface any faster. Version one was quite slow, this version is meant to be more responsive

To try and make the tests fair, I ran the old version and the new version on the same hardware (a Dell poweredge server) , and at the same time of day, so both versions should have the same amount of work to do. The Server was also scanning 3 different vlans on both tests.

Test Results

Test Conclusions

So, the initial clam of Spicworks 2 being a lot faster in the scanning stakes is indeed true, and I have to say the speed increase was very impressive. Now onto what it actually found.

Over the weekend we did a big upgrade, part of witch meant all the reports had to be recreated to work with the new database schema, so I told people they would have to setup any subscriptions again.

First of all I think the being able to create subscriptions is a great idea. The only downside to it is having to specify a username/password to run as (i’m not sure how you could get round this though apart from running all the subscription reports as a specific user), and the fact that it has no built in print functionally.

To get round the lack of printing, we use a product call batch print pro, available from traction-software.co.uk. It is a fantastic piece of software that you point at a directory, and it monitors in there for PDF files and sends them to a printer you specify as they drop in. The setup of it is sometimes a bit odd but it worked well.

Anyway, a user created her subscriptions again but could not edit them once they changed, she kept getting an error when hitting save:

An internal error occurred on the report server. See the error log for more details. (rsInternalError)
The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘sp_add_category’, database ‘msdb’, schema ‘dbo’.

For some reason, when I looked on the reports server config, the windows service identity section was in an error state. I just put the username and password back in, and it worked again. I didn’t even have to restart reporting services

Just a quick post after my rant yesterday, seams like Microsoft is already working on a new version of Internet Explorer , at least according to the IE developer blog. You can read the entry at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/05/internet-explorer-8.aspx

There is no mention of new features or anything yet, but keep checking back as i’m sure they will post the latest info there first.