Bryant Likes's Blog

Take Outs: The Digital Doggy Bag of Blog Bits for 24 February 2004

First, thanks for taking the time to post your learnings around RS and your feedback. It's appreciated by both myself and the rest of the SQL Server group. Second, thanks for being an RS customer. Keep sending feedback my way so we can keep building the product you really want and need.


Answers to your questions/comments below:

The toolbar. It would be nice if you could specify to get only certain parts of the toolbar and if you could load the toolbar by itself in another frame.
--> Great feedback. Something we can definitely look at doing in the future. Today, we can turn off the toolbar using URL commands.

It seems there is something strange with the report width and height. It seems like you always get an extra wide report even if you set it up to be narrow in the report designer.
--> We've never seen this before so you may want to raise an issue with product support.


Web Services - This is pretty straightforward, however, it doesn't work very well if you're trying to hit the web service from a another server by passing the Credentials. You end up not being able to authenticate since it is a double-hop.
--> You can use Basic Authentication to get to another machine. You can also use constrained delegation in Windows Server 2003 to allow the web server to logon as you on the other server. That's something you can try since I haven't tried it myself yet with RS.

3) Exporting to XML.

Haven't tried this yet. What would be a good reason to export this to XML?

4) Subscriptions and rendering formats.

These are also pretty easy to use. The email subscription doesn't seem to be compatible with Lotus Notes which is a real problem for us. Links do work, but they aren't as impressive as getting the full report in the email itself.

Some things I would like Reporting Services to do better:

1) Get some decent charting functionality. The way it currently works you can't even change the color of the chart items (you can only switch between pallettes).

2) Allow me to pass in the RDL to the Render function. There must be some way to do this since the report preview works in Visual Studio, but I haven't figured it out yet.

3) Provide some best practices for accessing the service via ASP.Net apps. I've heard that there are some Reporting Services Web Parts coming soon (which will solve a lot of problems for me), but how about some general guidelines on how to integrate Reporting Services into a web application.

Overall Reporting Services is a great product that we have been very happy with.



posted on Tuesday, February 24, 2004 11:55 AM

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# Take Outs: The Digital Doggy Bag of Blog Bits for 24 February 2004
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Take Outs: The Digital Doggy Bag of Blog Bits for 24 February 2004
Posted @ 2/24/2004 6:16 PM

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Answers to your questions/comments below:

The toolbar. It would be nice if you could specify to get only certain parts of the toolbar and if you could load the toolbar by itself in another frame.
--> Great feedback. Something we can definitely look at doing in the future. Today, we can turn off the toolbar using URL commands.

It seems there is something strange with the report width and height. It seems like you always get an extra wide report even if you set it up to be narrow in the report designer.
--> We've never seen this before so you may want to raise an issue with product support.


Web Services - This is pretty straightforward, however, it doesn't work very well if you're trying to hit the web service from a another server by passing the Credentials. You end up not being able to authenticate since it is a double-hop.
--> You can use Basic Authentication to get to another machine. You can also use constrained delegation in Windows Server 2003 to allow the web server to logon as you on the other server. That's something you can try since I haven't tried it myself yet with RS.

Exporting to XML
--> A couple of good reasons to do it. Perhaps you want to control formatting of the report and use XSLT to transform it to HTML. Maybe you want to batch feed the report into another system that only supports XML. There are a bunch more.

Subscriptions - These are also pretty easy to use. The email subscription doesn't seem to be compatible with Lotus Notes which is a real problem for us. Links do work, but they aren't as impressive as getting the full report in the email itself.
--> We send MHTML and use SMTP. If Lotus mangles it, there's probably something that Lotus is not doing right. I've got a copy of Exchange Server I could send to you to help solve this problem :)

The do better part:
1) Something we're definitely looking at.
2) Create a temp copy of the report and then render it. Something we are also looking at for the future.
3) The Web Services API is the way to go here. The Web Parts are great for SharePoint but if you're using pure ASP .NET, the web services are your best friend.

Keep the feedback coming!

Tom

I would like to ask how to remove an extension file in export function:
for example i only want to view the pdf format when i click the select format dropdown in export function pls help... tnx in advance
i think its something in RSReportDesigner.config file but i dont know how to do it...

As you state in your blog, "The email subscription doesn't seem to be compatible with Lotus Notes which is a real problem for us."

Our new product, Proposion Report Adapter for Microsoft Reporting Services and Lotus Notes/Domino fixes this problem and a lot more. (It also allows you to use Notes/Domino as data sources for reports and/or allows you to automatically deposit scheduled reports into Notes databases. See http://www.proposion.com/ReportAdapter.