Tab Delimited Renderer in SSRS 2005

I was recently tasked with coming up with a tab delimited renderer in SSRS 2005.

My first thought was to use the CSV renderer and add a config entry in the ReportServer.config file to use a tab as a field delimiter.
However, in SSRS 2005, Microsoft clears any whitespace when reading the config file for the CSV renderer, meaning that the tab character does not work.

So I set about researching how to create a tab renderer.

The first article I read stated that you would have to visit Redmond, WA and sit with an SSRS developer to even think about developing a rendering extension. I didn't buy this and kept searching.

There isn't a lot out there on rendering extensions, but I did find several references to the following assemblies:

Microsoft.ReportingServices.Interfaces
Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportRendering

So with that, I started to develop a prototype solution to the tab rendering problem.

My first decision was to only render tables and matrices. The SSRS CSV renderer tries to render textboxes, which only leads to malformed CSV files. And since most of the time the tab delimited export is going to be loaded into Excel, I decided to just focus on the table and the matrix control.

More to come in the next post...

Timeouts in SSRS 2005 Web Service and Report Viewer Control

One of the questions that I get asked a lot is how to prevent timeouts when running or exporting large reports using the SSRS web service or the .NET report viewer control.

With the report viewer control, this is fairly simple; the problem is that the property is hiding in the property tab. In the property tab, expand the ServerReport property, and set the timeout value to a large number or to -1 (infinite timeout)

For the web services, the ReportExecutionService instance contains the property Timeout.

In my previous post showing how to use the web service, I neglected to add the timeout property.

ReportExecutionService re = new ReportExecutionService();
re.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
re.Timeout = -1;

Also, when working with the web service in SSRS 2005, you have to keep the IIS timeouts in mind. For example, the session timeout by default is 20 minutes. If you have reports taking longer than that, you would need to increase this setting in IIS. However, if your reports are taking that long, I would consider using SSIS to pre-process the report data on a schedule and then run the report against the pre processed data. That is a much more elegant solution.

peace

ReportingService2005 Web Service

Well, I know it’s been a while, but I am finally back after the holidays!

The next phase of our reporting project is about to take off, and I had a little down time while waiting on requirements.

So, using the ReportingService2005 web service, I created a report deployment application in C#.

It allows me to select the directory of my RDL/RDS files, and then select my report server and any folder on that server.

Then it deploys the selected reports to the report server with the one button click.

I can then change the report server, and deploy the same reports to that server. This is helpful if you have multiple systems that should stay in sync. Using dynamic web service connections allows me to change the target server within code.


Working with the web service was rather straightforward, and allowed me to do everything I needed to do as far as deploying reports and data sources.
However, what I wanted to write about was a catch that had me stumped for a few minutes.

When you use the CreateReport method of the web service, the data sources are not linked to the server data sources. So what I did was use the GetItemDataSources method to get the report data sources, built a new data source in code, representing the server data source, and then used the SetItemDataSources method to update the report data sources.

DataSource[] dataSources = rs.GetItemDataSources(TargetFolder + "/" + ReportName);

foreach (DataSource ds in dataSources)
{
if (ds.Item.GetType() == typeof(InvalidDataSourceReference))
{
string dsName = ds.Name.ToString();

DataSource serverDS = new DataSource();
DataSourceReference serverDSRef = new DataSourceReference();
serverDSRef.Reference = "/Data Sources/" + dsName;
serverDS.Item = serverDSRef;
serverDS.Name = dsName;
DataSource[] serverDataSources = new DataSource[] { serverDS };
rs.SetItemDataSources(TargetFolder + "/" + ReportName, serverDataSources);
}
}

This nicely updated the report data sources to use the server shared data sources.

All in all, the 1½ days I spent writing this app were well worth it. I learned about the deployment methods of the web service, and kept my coding skills up, plus I have a nice deployment utility for reports!

peace