Reporting Services

Cannot export Local Reporting Services Reports to excel or pdf?

Shawn Weisfeld — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:15:47 GMT

If you get the following error when trying to export a Local Reporting services report to excel or pdf:

Internet Explorer cannot download … ReportViewerWebControl.axd from <server name>
Internet explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.

You might want to check the properties on your virtual directory. Here is mine before I made the change. As you can see it is set to “no-cache”. What I think is happening is that IE downloads the excel/pdf file (confirmed this via fiddler) then deletes it, then tries to open it.

To fix the issue I removed the three lines in the middle:
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0

Hope this helps you out. . . .

Reporting Services 2008 is still using the XLS (BIFF) file format

Shawn Weisfeld — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:41:16 GMT

Rant start . . . .

I was in a meeting and we were talking about SSRS and I have heard yet again that Excel 2007 is great because it breaks the 65k record limit. That is wonderful, but IMHO, Microsoft has dropped the ball with SSRS 2008 since it is still using the BIFF file format.

From my read of Books Online (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159836.aspx), “Excel places limitations on exported reports due to the BIFF's format capabilities” but why are we still using BIFF and XLS? Why are we not using XLSX and the newer (heck it is 3 years old now) file format?

Ok, rant over. . . . thanks for listening.

Creating a Green-Bar (Zebra Stripe) Report on Groups in Reporting Services

sweisfeld — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:34:00 GMT

Question: How do you create a green-bar (zebra stripe) report using groups in reporting services?

Answer: I have seen many examples of creating green-bar reports where each record alternated colors. All one has to do is add a row_number field to their query and use the following expression in the Background color property of the Table Row.

=iif(Fields!row.Value Mod 2 = 0,"Green","White")

But when doing groups and you want each group to alternate colors it is a little more complex, but the trick is still the same. Following the same principal I needed a way to get row numbers for each Group of data. In my example I am pulling Employee data from the AdventureWorks database. To add the group row numbers I first use a Common Table Expression to pull a list of distinct states. Then join that list back to the view adding in the row numbers.

WITH States AS
(
SELECT DISTINCT [StateProvinceName]
FROM [AdventureWorks].[HumanResources].[vEmployee]
)
SELECT V.[EmployeeID]
      ,V.[Title]
      ,V.[FirstName]
      ,V.[MiddleName]
      ,V.[LastName]
      ,V.[Suffix]
      ,V.[JobTitle]
      ,V.[Phone]
      ,V.[EmailAddress]
      ,V.[EmailPromotion]
      ,V.[AddressLine1]
      ,V.[AddressLine2]
      ,V.[City]
      ,V.[StateProvinceName]
      ,V.[PostalCode]
      ,V.[CountryRegionName]
      ,V.[AdditionalContactInfo]
      ,S.row
FROM [AdventureWorks].[HumanResources].[vEmployee] AS V
JOIN (SELECT [StateProvinceName], ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY [StateProvinceName]) AS row FROM States) AS S
ON V.[StateProvinceName] = S.[StateProvinceName]
ORDER BY V.[StateProvinceName]

Resources:
Chris Hays's Reporting Services Sleazy Hacks Weblog
Green-Bar Matrix
http://blogs.msdn.com/chrishays/archive/2004/08/30/GreenBarMatrix.aspx

SQL Server 2005 Books Online (September 2007)
ROW_NUMBER (Transact-SQL)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186734.aspx

SSRS Web Services

sweisfeld — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:58:00 GMT

The other day I was talking to another local developer that was interested in using reporting services, but while the “Report Viewer” control provided by Microsoft is fast and easy it doesn’t necessarily fit into the business requirements that his users have outlined. To that end it is a good thing that Microsoft provided Web Service access to all of the report servers functionality. Since a high level of customization is needed to the UI and the Report Server already provides much if not all of the data you need to build it my recommendation is to build the UI dynamically by queering the report server for information.

I would start by reviewing this article by Marian Dumitrascu. While his implementation is using RS 2000 and looks like the report viewer it should spark the seed to show you what is possible. SQL Reporting Services Viewer Page Using SOAP API (http://www.codeproject.com/sqlrs/SQLRSViewer.asp)

Some general information about the Report Server Web Service can be found here: SQL Server 2005 Books Online - Building Applications Using the Web Service and the .NET Framework (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms154699.aspx)

Finally if you want to render the report and return it to the user as a file take a look at this article: How to create a sample application that uses the Reporting Services SOAP APIs to render a report to a selected file format on a Web page (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875447)