Articles - Joel Lipman .Com

SSRS External Images don't display

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 19 September 2011; Hits: 53168

The Situation
We want some photos taken from another website of ours to display in our report. These are not stored locally on the Reporting Server because other services use these photos on our Intranet and we only want one location to upload the photos. These images are provided via a website address (http) or network share (file).

Before you ask, we have several MS Sharepoint sites but we didn't go down the route of uploading 10000+ images into a Sharepoint database though we are still considering it; so this article is more about just getting external images to display when they are provided over an authenticated URL (You shouldn't be having any issues with this if the image is available to anonymous users - eg. Google Logo).

Our Setup

Windows XP Workstation
Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS)
SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Server (SSRS) running on Windows Server 2003
Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS)

Problem #1: Image does not appear within SSRS
When previewing the report in BIDS, the photo appears fine. If we deploy the report to our Reporting Server and attempt to view it using a Web-Browser, the image does not display:

Get report to see images hosted on an external URL
Check if image exists to display alternative placeholding image.

: Joel Lipman; Excel; 05 September 2011; Hits: 17629

So I googled this for a while and there are a lot of solutions out there, none of which applied to what we meant and lots of people in the same boat.

The Situation
We have an Excel report which summarizes for our guys at the top, all the activities and time spent by staff. There are several filters available on the report (only a few to keep it simple silly). When you click on the filter, a dropdown appears with all available values listed.

The Problem
The values are listed in alphabetical order at first. If any new values come along then they get added to the bottom of the list... This is the problem. For example, if the year dropdown has a list of 2010, 2011, 2013; then if you add an entry which has year 2012, then the dropdown list will be in the following order: 2010, 2011, 2013, 2012.

The Solution

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 02 September 2011; Hits: 16699

I'm storing a note here because it took a while to figure out and googling other solutions did not answer our questions but did lead us to a workaround.

So this is regarding an error when trying to add parameters to a Stored Procedure of an Oracle database from within Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

The Error

copy raw

ORA-00911: invalid character 
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_UTILITY", line 114 
ORA-06512: at line 1 (System.Data.OracleClient)

ORA-00911: invalid character
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_UTILITY", line 114
ORA-06512: at line 1 (System.Data.OracleClient)

The Situation
I'm using Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 to develop a Reporting solution on a Windows XP workstation. We are connecting to a SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Service (SSRS) with Team Foundation Server 2010. The database with our stored procedure is Oracle 10g.

The Stored Procedure
Rather than a returned dataset, our Stored Procedure updates a field in one of our Oracle tables and returns nothing. It accepts 3 parameters: The StudentID (reference) varchar2, Username (who's running the report) varchar2 and a JobID (request reference) number.

Category: SQL Server Reporting Services :: Article: 380

: Joel Lipman; Oracle PL/SQL; 30 August 2011; Hits: 7944

Just a quick note as to something that worked for me. Taken from the Oracle forums @ https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=6861756

Situation
I have one column of values that I've suffixed a comma to but I want to display this as a rows in a table. This is for Oracle PL/SQL.

: Joel Lipman; MySQL; 24 August 2011; Hits: 7964

Hopefully the title doesn't put you off but after much Googling and Bing-ing, I still couldn't figure out how to do this. Hopefully this article will help you more than my search engine skills do.

My Setup
Windows XP Workstation
...needs to open...
Excel 2007 SP2
...with ODBC to...
MySQL v5+
...hosting database...
ActivityLog
...contains activity, staffID, resourceID, start time, end time...

Report Specification
PivotTable Report
...resources in row (along the side)...
...staff in columns (along the top)...
...persondays in values (the number my bosses want - 7h 24m or 26640s is 1 person day)...
With date range as parameters
...ouch...
...and it was so easy up to here...

: Joel Lipman; Wordpress; 16 August 2011; Hits: 14910

Migrating the articles:

Change database name my_joomla_db to your joomla database and my_wordpress_db to your Wordpress database
Change http://demo.joellipman.com/wordpress/ to the full URL of your WordPress site.
If post_type is to be post then append with ?p= otherwise use ?page_id=.

Articles:

------ MIGRATING JOOMLA v1.5.# CONTENT TO WORDPRESS v3.2.# ------
-----------------------------------------------------------------

INSERT INTO my_wordpress_db.wp_posts
SELECT
	id 'ID',
	1 'post_author',
	created 'post_date',
	created 'post_date_gmt',
	CONCAT(introtext, ' ', `fulltext`) 'post_content',
	title 'post_title',
	'' post_excerpt,
	CASE state WHEN '1' THEN 'publish' ELSE 'draft' END 'post_status',
	'open' comment_status,
	'open' ping_status,
	'' post_password,
	alias 'post_name',
	'' to_ping,
	'' pinged,
	modified 'post_modified',
	modified 'post_modified_gmt',
	'' post_content_filtered,
	'0' post_parent,
	CONCAT('http://demo.joellipman.com/wordpress/', '?p=', id) AS guid,
	'0' menu_order,
	'post' AS 'post_type',
	'' post_mime_type,
	0 comment_count
FROM
	my_joomla_db.jos_content
ORDER BY
	id

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 12 August 2011; Hits: 10905

What?
This article serves to describe several workarounds or proofs of concept.

Why?
We have a first report which acts like a search page. You enter the student you are looking for by reference or name and if there is only 1 result in the results page, then we want it to redirect to the details report for that student automatically.

How?
So there are various solutions out there, here's an overview of some:

Method #1

Create one report with all selectable reports as subreports - toggle visibilty based on parameter.

Method #2

Add a button below "View Report" linked to some script code (requires change to ASP pages on the ReportingServer, ie. affects all reports on that server).

Method #3

Use ASP instead of SSRS.

Method #4

Use a TimeInterval refreshing the page after a certain time.

Conclusion
In the end, this came down to a design decision. Time spent on trying to find a solution was not considered to be warranted. My reports use a parameter for the connection string to specify which server and database to connect to and the follow on link was enough as a solution. My seniors advised that if we had time in the future we could expand on this further.

Google Searches that got me nowhere:

ssrs process parameter after report execution
auto-redirect after are a report is run
ssrs vbscript post report processing
ssrs auto redirect based on a dataset value

The ReportServer Database

: Joel Lipman; Databases; 08 August 2011; Hits: 7456

Amazing, I have just spent all morning on Microsoft websites to determine what number is the TimeDataRetrieval column displaying. Thank you I know it's an INT. There is just a serious lack of documentation as to what this database is and how it populates its data.

View: ExecutionLog

InstanceName	nvarchar(38)	NOT NULL	Name of the report server instance that handled the request. Usually YOURSERVERNAME\MSSQLSERVER
ReportID	uniqueidentifier	NULL	The ID of the report (looks like a hexadecimal SSID). It's the unique ID of the report but not unique in the table (can be referenced many times).
UserName	nvarchar(260)	NULL	Windows authenticated username and domain of the person running the report (eg. MYDOMAIN\myusername)
RequestType	bit	NOT NULL	User or System. Can be 1 or 0. This was zero "0" when I would run a report as a user.
Format	nvarchar(26)	NULL	This is the rendering format. Mostly RPL if viewed in MS Internet Explorer.
Parameters	ntext	NULL	Parameters and the values they were submitted with.
TimeStart	datetime	NOT NULL	Time report started to run.
TimeEnd	datetime	NOT NULL	Time report finished running? Need to check what finished?
TimeDataRetrieval	int	NOT NULL	Milliseconds spent retrieving the data.
TimeProcessing	int	NOT NULL	Milliseconds spent processing the report.
TimeRendering	int	NOT NULL	Milliseconds spent rendering the report.
Source	int	NOT NULL	Source of the report exection (1=Live, 2=Cache, 3=Snapshot, 4=History)
Status	nvarchar(32)	NOT NULL	either rsSuccess or an error code; if multiple errors occur, only the first error is recorded
ByteCount	bigint	NOT NULL	Size of rendered reports in bytes.
RowCount	bigint	NOT NULL	Number of rows returned from queries.

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 03 August 2011; Hits: 8022

So I'm looking for a SQL query that could do this all in one go and return all the results in one table.

With PHP & MySQL it's pretty simple: use individual SQL queries to get the count of yesterday, yesterweek, yestermonth, yesteryear and do the layout in PHP.

Now let's say I have one RDL or SSRS Solution. I could do a dataset per SQL query but it doesn't seem that ideal.

In Theory:

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 03 August 2011; Hits: 8614

So I find myself using date ranges endlessly as I've been working in SSRS. The below is derived from a collection of various sources across the web as well as some of my own. These are what worked in my environment: WinXP, BIDS (vs2008), TFS (vs2010), SSRS 2008 R2. The following examples assume today's date is Wednesday 03 August 2011 @ 11:46:

This Week:

copy raw

-- Start Date (US format - mm/dd/yyyy)
=DateAdd("d", -(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today()) // yields: 8/1/2011

-- End Date (US format - mm/dd/yyyy)
=DateAdd("d", -1, DateAdd("d", 7-(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today())) // yields: 8/7/2011

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- Start Date (european format - dd/mm/yyyy)
=Format(DateAdd("d", -(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today()), "dd/MM/yyyy") //yields 01/08/2011

-- End Date (european format - dd/mm/yyyy)
=Format(DateAdd("d", -1, DateAdd("d", 7-(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today())), "dd/MM/yyyy") // yields: 07/08/2011

-- Start Date (US format - mm/dd/yyyy)
=DateAdd("d", -(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today()) // yields: 8/1/2011
-- End Date (US format - mm/dd/yyyy)
=DateAdd("d", -1, DateAdd("d", 7-(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today())) // yields: 8/7/2011
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Start Date (european format - dd/mm/yyyy)
=Format(DateAdd("d", -(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today()), "dd/MM/yyyy") //yields 01/08/2011
-- End Date (european format - dd/mm/yyyy)
=Format(DateAdd("d", -1, DateAdd("d", 7-(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today())), "dd/MM/yyyy") // yields: 07/08/2011

This Month:

Category: SQL Server Reporting Services :: Article: 373

: Joel Lipman; Windows OS; 28 July 2011; Hits: 1808

Just a quick note here. This is an article based on the REG file from Kelly's Korner (@www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm). I'm not fond of downloading REG files and running them even if I have checked what it's doing. I'm putting a note here just for me:

Start > Run > Regedit > OK
Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Create New DWORD Value
Name it "MaxRecentDocs"
Double-click on the new DWORD
Set value data to "19" ( equals 25 )
Leave Base as "Hexadecimal"
OK
Restart your computer

Sort order a dropdown list in MS InfoPath without programming

: Joel Lipman; Infopath; 21 July 2011; Hits: 32530

So this is for Microsoft Office Infopath 2007 (SharePoint 2007).

The situation is that I started creating a SharePoint List (datasheet) and when I made my form dropdown read from the list, it just put elements in the order that I entered them in the datasheet.

Googling this led me to browse MSDN for an hour before I realised all those experts were using programming solutions that seemed a bit over the top for something that should be so simple.

Hey presto, I found a cheat/workaround:

Click on the list to see your datasheet (has a MS Access icon in the top left to remind you what you're getting yourself into)
Go to Settings
Select Create View
Select Datasheet View (you could probably use a "Standard View", I just used the Datasheet one)
Give the view a name, select what columns you want the form to have (I included the IDs for functional purposes)
Further down the "Create View" page, there should be a Sort section, specify the column to sort by.
Save the view by clicking the OK button.

You'll be returned to your datasheet and it's possible it isn't in any different order. I re-checked out my InfoPath form, looked at the dropdown that was already configured to read off the sharepoint list, and it had re-ordered to what I set in the view!!! I don't really understand how it works only that it does. I think this could get complicated if you had two dropdowns reading off the same list but needed to list elements in different orders.

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