I have several SSRS Reports currently. I want to be able to add all of them to some type of Source Control so I can manage different versions and edits. I was wondering if anyone has had experience adding SSRS Reports to Tortoise SVN or another Source Control besides TFS... All I want to do is be able to see what a user does if he/she changes something in a report and saves over it... I want to be able to retrieve the copy before they saved just in case they break the report. Thanks!
Call me a fossil, but I still use Visual SourceSafe as a repository for my SSRS and SSIS report projects. It does what you describe pretty much "out of the box", as long as you're diligent about check-ins and labels and such.
This does, of course, raise the question "Is Visual SourceSafe still available/supported?", and I don't know the answer to that.
Related
Background
In our environment, we are constantly making changes to our work item types (WITs), due to changes in our procedures. We currently have two main collections; one collection has around 5 projects, and the other one has around 20. For each project, we have 7 different WITs.
It gets kind of cumbersome when I have to make the a change to the templates, because I have to change them on every project/collection that we have. Typically, I just modify one template, and use the command line (witadmin) to import that xml file into each project. It's really difficult to know whether or not WITs are current on all projects.
What I am looking for
I would like to find a way to easily modify the WITs once, and have
it update all of the projects with those changes.
It would also be nice to have a GUI to modify these WIT. Does TFS 2012 and TFS 2013 handle WIT modification better?
What I Already Know
I am pretty comfortable running TFS/DOS commands, so I ultimately could
create a batch script that would automate that for me. This would
probably be a last resort scenario.
Another option would be to write an app using the TFS SDK and import the WITs to all projects.
Current Configuration TFS 2010 and VS 2012 (We are soon upgrading to TFS 2012)
Fortunately Grant Holliday did an excellent post on that topic.
A quick method is automating your WIT export\import with batch files (ExportWITDs.cmd, ImportWITDs.cmd). Then use the Checkin.cmd example to check-in the changes to a dedicated folder for WITs on the source control.
If your'e looking for a tidier, more robust solution, go for the TFS-SDK. A Visual Studio extension that adds an Export\Import\Sync All WITs buttons would be great.
Here's a problem which is driving us nuts. We have an old VB2005 application which only needs a new RDLC report adding.
However to add the RDLC we need to add a new data source. Every time we try to add a new datasource using the Object option (not dataset) we get this error:
Now, you can get some help on Google for this but a lot of it is for web projects. This is a Winforms project.
Here's what we've tried:
devenv.exe /ResetSettings
checking the Assembly name doesn't have any punctuation or weird characters in it (this is a favourite solution from Google) - it doesn't
removing the source control (Perforce)
rebuilding the project from scratch
Our solution was to upgrade the project to VS2008. Didn't really want to as we feared destabilising the application in unpredictable ways just to achieve an edit in a report.
But in fact the upgrade did solve the data source problem, and so far at least, there haven't been any side effects.
I am designing a reporting page using WinForms.ReportViewer and only process the data locally. It means we want to display some information from objects that we designed. For example, we have our own classes for date and time. However, in the report page this date and time information can not be displayed correctly (shows #ERROR). Is there any way to tell it how to show our information? Thanks!
With the newer ReportViewer versions, MS has introduced an error that disables the possibility for navigation within objecs.
They have corrected the error with the last service pack a little and if your objects support serialization, now navigation may work.
For my newer projects built with report viewer 2010, I have started to write a wrapper for each object/entity I have to render. I started with this during the time, no fix was available and now I'm very comfortable with this pattern. In the first moment, it gives a little more of work, but it has given me great flexibility and left my code clean. And if one day I dont have the patience to work further with report viewer anymore, it will make it easy to move my projects to another reporting engine.
I'm looking to build a reporting portal on top of our database which is SQL Server 2008 R2.
It's been suggested that I use SSRS, and I've played around with it for a few hours. I found it very easy to point it to a table and have it generate a table/graphs for you. It could all be done in a few minutes, and that's great.
I had a hard time customizing the report to make it look nice. I thought it was like using Word to design a website, the customization was pretty limited. I have experience in web development using ASP.NET with jQuery, and I'm currently thinking that I could make the portal much faster if I could use my experience with those technologies.
I'd like to get advice on which path is best for my project.
Queries to the db are fairly simple, but not trivial. I have no problem building the data and business layers myself by using Linq-to-Sql.
I do not need print support
I need an emailing system that sends out reports every day, which I can also build myself (it doesn't need to let users subscribe to reports)
Don't need the flexibility of having users create their own reports. This is only for 2-3 different reports.
I enjoy the development experience using web technologies and feel comfortable building a pleasant user experience with jQuery and plugins. I fear that using SSRS, I would be limited to something ugly and not "fun" to use.
I want this project to be up in 2-3 weeks. I can't afford to re-invent the wheel for everything, but I also don't want to spend most of my time asking questions like "how do I make a fade-in effect in ssrs?"
How easy is it to customize the UI? Are there good examples online of what can be achieved? Does SSRS have some advantage that I could hardly get by writing my custom solution? I'm thinking in terms of application performance and overall functionality.
Thanks for your input.
I have built custom web interface to a suite of SSRS reports. You can easily do this, and submit the gathered report parameters to Reporting Services, and have it render the generated report to a web page, all as if the user had used the SSRS interface to begin with.
Some comments i would make:
let SSRS handle the reporting side of things. It has all the power and features you could need. And its free. And tested. And extensible. And renders to multiple (printable) formats.
you could maybe look at buying a set of controls designed to be used with SSRS to get even nicer chart output
you can build your own (parameter gathering & report triggering) interface within three weeks, but the schedule will be tight
you can't use jQuery within the rendered reports. A lot of the HTML within the rendered report is hardcoded template type code (styles etc are embedded into the report rather than linking to an external file)
you don't need jQuery fade-in panels to make your reports pretty :)
So, as you know SSRS allows web and winforms output, printing, and all that. But your users will undoubtedly end up bugging your for PDF and Excel exporting, which is also built-in.
It's also a lot easier to edit the reports without having to alter your app and as you mentioned it has the emailing built in.
SSRS is quite powerful if you play around with the grouping and parameterization. The designer is a little clunky as you make more complicated reports, but I've always been able to design what I want. I've not used Crystal Reports but presumably it's even more powerful but it is another thing to learn and obtain.
I use 2 main reporting tools (Business Objects and SSRS) and also Microsoft Access. I can honestly say that I prefer SSRS for 95% of the work I do. The users really like all the drill through options you can do. For example lets say you have a chart showing widgets sold, you can click on that bar of the bar graph and have it drill to a report showing a breakdown of which widgets were sold.
This ability of going from a “high level” to low level detail is really powerful to the users. As for looks, I quite like the default controls that ship with report builder 3.0, they have come a long way and just look what is around the corner with project crescent
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlrsteamblog/archive/2010/11/09/a-glimpse-at-project-crescent.aspx
I know it's probably not a WEB-BASED technology but I would definitely give Crystal Reports a try. Specially considering your time constraints...
Is it possible to embed the Visual Studio 2010 report designer functionality into my WPF application?
Initially I was considering the use of Report builder, but for providing ad-hoc reporting capability from within application, I need to teach users too many steps before they start creating a simple report. So I am now thinking of simplifying it by embedding the report Designer (if it is possible), and do all the basic steps programatically and show the design surface and Data objects on the left.
Any help is appreciated.
I have not found any good way so far and decided to use Report Builder instead. The approach I took is to build a report skeleton programtically with connection and query embedded in the RDL to expose object model instead of tables and views and launching the Report Builder to open this RDL. Yes.. there is lot of overhead that I need to build a query with lot of unnecessary fields and joins and the resulting performance is terrible. In a future version I will come up asking the users the fields they need to use int he report to improve performance.
Looks like Microsoft is going to make customers pay for SSRS from 2012 version. So this choice of use SSRS may even b ruled out.