Recently quite a few of our users have been asking if they can show all of the report details at runtime, instead of having to drill down all the groups, opening and closing as they see fit. Well, the answer is yes, and its very easy to implement.

Parameters are you friend

The first thing to do is create yourself a new parameter in the report, and call it something like par_expand_groups. Give it the following options:

Now, you need to make this parameter control weather or not the group is expanded as the report is ran, you do this by putting an expression into the hidden property of the row.

Normally if you have a group, when you run the report it will probably be hidden and the user has the option of showing the details, so the hidden property will be set to true. We are going to set it to the following expression:

=IIF(Parameters!par_expand_groups.Value = “True”, False, True)

This means that if the parameter is set to yes, the details will be shown, if its set to no they will remain hidden. Add this to each level of grouping on your report, and the user now has control over what they see

Slight Problem with the show/hide icons

Once you have added this to your report, you might notice a slight problem. If you run the report with the option of showing the group details, the little show/hide icon on the left used to toggle the details will be wrong. It will be showing the ‘+’ even though the details are already showing, and if you press it to hide the details it will change to a ‘-’. They are the wrong way round!

Obviously, this is going to confuse your users, and needs sorting. Well, thanks to a tip from http://www.lukehayler.com/2009/07/custom-visibility-toggling-in-ssrs its easy.

All you need to do is open up the properties of the text box that is the trigger for the show hide, and go into the Visibility tab. At the bottom is an  option to set an expression for the toggle image. just enter:

=IIF(Parameters!par_expand_groups.Value = “True”, True, False)

As before, they is just looking at your parameter and setting the value of the toggle image. Now, when you run the report with the option to display the details, they icons for toggling the details should be correct.

Not sure how many of you have hit this, but recently we have had a problem with users not being able to print out reports from the browser. When they hit the print icon after runnig a report, they are given the message

‘Cannot load client print control’

Turns out that one of the patches Microsoft issue out (on a seemingly never ending basis) breaks(well, blocks) the activex. The patch in question is the ActiveX killbit one (i cant remember the kb number), there appears to be a problem with the old version of the print control activex, and when the latest patch is applied to the clients it stops the print control working.

The way to get it working again is basilcly to patch your reports server. This is something i am always a bit cautious of doing, as in the past i have had problems (service pack one removed the ability to do a multi select parameter) but this time i had a virtual server i could snapshot, patch then test.

To get it working again, i installed first of all SQL 2005 service pack 2 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=d07219b2-1e23-49c8-8f0c-63fa18f26d3a&displaylang=en), then the latest hotfix rollup (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956854). On a couple of the client machines this seemed to fix the problem without having to re-download the control, but on others we had to remove the control first, then re-install it and it worked a treat

I am in the process of writing a reporting service that will be used across our whole company. The problem I have is there is not one central database all the reports will run of, each division has its own separate one. Lucky the database schema’s are consistent, but I needed a way of:

a) setting the report data source at run time and
b) letting the users control the database they want to connect to. Some high level user need to be able to access multiple databases, while others will just need access to their local one

So, here’s how I went about doing it.

Setting Data source at Run time

Normally, when you setup a reports data source in reporting services, you just point it to the database you want it to use (probably using a shared data source) give it some credentials and off you go. You would probably end up with a connection string looking something like this:

Under normal circumstances that would work fine. But not this time. I need an easy way to replace the information held in the connection string with some sort of variable.

Turns out the easiest way to do it is by using a parameter in the connection string. You can create the connection string as an expression as if you were working with any other part of the report. However, before doing this you first need to create the parameters and fill them with some data.

Data Source Table

In the reports database, I created two new tables, one that will hold the name of the reports servers, database names and Active directory group with access to this data source. The other one will contain all the user names and what Database they are currently using. Download the SQL scrip to create the databases below

hello

Run this script on your reports sever database, and you will have two new tables, database_details and user_details. In order to do the tests you will need to create an entry in the database table (database_details) for your database, and an entry in the user table (user_details) for your username (include the domain name so it should read dom\joe.bloggs) and point it using the site_id filed to the database. You are now ready to create the SQL in the report that will populate the parameters

Dataset Containing the database connection details

Create yourself a test report, and in that report create a new dataset that points at your reports server database. The SQL needs to be the following:

SELECT     jp_user_details.username, jp_database_details.server_name, jp_database_details.database_name
FROM         jp_user_details INNER JOIN
jp_database_details ON jp_user_details.site_id = jp_database_details.site_id

This will return all the names in your database, what we need to do now is make sure at run time it only returns data for the user running the report. To do that we need to put a filter on the report. The filter will be:

Fields!username.value=User!UserID

and should look like this in your Dataset properties

The Parameters

Once you have done this dataset, you need to create a couple of parameters. One will be for the server name, one for the database name. So go into your report parameters and create the following, with these options:

Name – ServerName
Datatype - String
Hidden - Yes
Available Values from Query: Select your dataset , then both values fields need to be server_name
Default Values From Query – Select your dataset, value field is server_name

Name – DatabaseName
Datatype - String
Hidden - Yes
Available Values from Query: Select your dataset , then both values fields need to be database_name
Default Values From Query – Select your dataset, value field is database_name

What does this do? Well, when you run your report now you will have the two parameters you have just created filled in with the server name and database name the person running the report wants to report on. The parameters are set to hidden so the user knows nothing about them.

Final Step, create your dynamic dataset

Now we have everything we need in place, the last step is to create a dataset that will look into the server held agaist the user, and retrive us the actul information we want. Create a new dataset, and in the connection string of this data source put the following:

= “data source=” & Parameters!ServerName.Value & “;initial catalog=” &  Parameters!DatabaseName.Value

It should look like this in the window

Now when you run the report, you data source will be based on the users choice held in the table

A couple of things to note

You will find it hard (probably impossable) to write the report with the parameterized data source. You’ll need to work with your local copy of the database hardcodded into the connection string first, then when you are happy with it change it to the parameter driven one. If you dont do this the report designer wont be able to read the dataset.

You also need to be carful the order in witch you put your user paramters on the report. I found that if i did’nt put data driven parameters (ie a list of sales areas the user can select) at the top of the list, they were greyed out when you tried to run the report. Not sure why, but i asume its down the the order the datasets are exceuted in

If you have any problems with this, or have any different ways of doing it let me know!

I’ve been doing a bit of tweaking on a SQL Reporting Services install this week, trying to get it to run a bit better, get better logs out of it and generally try and improve its performance. So, what did I do?

Reports Timing out – This is a pain. I have a couple of reports that people run huge queries for, and sometimes the reports can time out while running. This was a fairly easy fix, just locate your rsreportserver.config file (mine was in (Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\Reporting Services\ReportServer). Open it up and alter the key:

DatabaseQueryTimeout- This is the amount of time the reports server will wait until it thinks the query to the server has timed out. You can set it to 0 (zero) for no timeout, but this is probably not a good idea. There is another key in there I thought might also help called SQLCommandTimeoutSeconds but according to the MS docs this is not used (so why the hell is it in there?)

Better Client Side Errors – Fault finding errors in the report viewer can be a bit painful, but you can enable remote errors to help you out a bit.
There  is a table in the reports server database called ConfigurationInfo. In here there is a EnableRemoteErrors property. If you set this to true and restart the reporting service clients will get better errors, helping you try and work out what is actually happening.

My next step with errors is to try and handle them properly in the reports. There is a ReportError event witch I think will do the trick. When I have worked out the best way to use it i will post about it here

Logs – As well as writing to the application event log, reporting services also write more detailed information into its own log files. These (along with crash dump files) can be found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\Reporting Services\LogFiles.

Using all this info I now find it easier to troubleshoot and tweek my environment. If anyone else has any handy hints let me know and ill add them to this post!