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SSRS - Lost window with datasets

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 25 March 2011; Hits: 33203

Re: Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008

Often happens to me and not sure why. You open the project and the window panel for the Report Data containing the parameters and datasets isn't there. I spent a bit of time enabling/disabling toolbars before I found this.

Open a Report solution (or have one open already?)
The menu link is "report data" and it's right at the bottom of the "View" menu.

Report Data at the bottom of the View menu when a report is loaded in the editor

Border settings not saving in SSRS

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 24 March 2011; Hits: 38177

This may sound silly to some but I've written a note because I spent time googling and still didn't find an answer.

My situation is that I wanted to put an expression to format the border (empty cells have a border and non-empty don't). This was so that a grid would show for empty spaces.

I wasn't getting very far because I'd even ask the border to be grey and save the project but when I come back to the setting, it's still black.

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 23 March 2011; Hits: 53195

Well I tried and I spent a few hours searching the net for a solution which displays the hours in the top columns, and undefined number of rooms in the rows. No all I was looking for was a calendar showing 1 day with the hours on the top. Working hours only as well...

Ok I admit I only googled for about 1 hour before I gave up and just wrote my own. Saying that it's taken me 4 hours just to do the below... hopefully it will be quicker next time now that I noted it all down.

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 23 February 2011; Hits: 23632

I thought I'd put something here as there are lots of posts like this on forums (a lot of which seem to be copied & pasted from other sites) but they refer to SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005.

This is how to do it in SQL Server 2008 and creating a report in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or MS Report Builder.

Scenario
I have a report that specifies some room bookings for a particular week. When I open the report, each drilldown row is collapsed (as opposed to expanded). The user can specify the date as it's a report parameter.

What we want
The user will select a date. We want the report to open with the specified day expanded and the remaining days that week to be collapsed (hidden). The first time I did this, I couldn't expand the remaining days so don't forget to tick the option "display can be toggled by this report item" like I did. ahem...

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 11 February 2011; Hits: 44728

Thought I'd put a note on how to remove the toolbar using the URL as I didn't find this clear on the net. Tried it and it didn't work. That's because I was using the Reporting Manager URL rather than the Reporting Server URL.

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 04 February 2011; Hits: 33803

This is just a note for me as it took a while to find on the net and even then it was confusing as to why it works but it does. Not sure whether you call this an MDX Query or part of a Transact-SQL mashup. You need to go to "Fill" (of each text box in the row - unless there's a faster way) and instead of color, click on the expression button (fx) and use the following:

=IIF(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "#ffffff", "#eeeeee")

or 

=IIF(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "WhiteSmoke", "Garamond")

This is telling the report to be white (=#ffffff) in row 1 (odd row numbers) and a very light grey (=#eeeeee) in row 2 (even row numbers). The first row being of all rows in the dataset and not for a particular drill-down item. It will alternate between the two for the rest of the report. [The second example is what I use most frequently].

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 07 January 2011; Hits: 30096

Once again I've spent a whole morning going in the wrong direction with a convincing SQL script. This article is just a note on when using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Report Builder 2.0 and when previewing the report, the parameters are not accounted for (ie. the SQL query creating the dataset does not use the parameters in its query).

Problems:

Given a date, the date format was reverting to US format as opposed to European
Given a Campus as a text value, the SQL query was ignoring this completely
Hardcoding the scalar local variables worked

: Category: SQL Server Reporting Services; 17 May 2010; Hits: 35377

Basically I thought that the regional settings of a report generated using Report Builder 2.0 on a MS SQL Server 2008 instance were dependent on either the server or the client machine. Realised that this was actually specified in the report. Here's a quick note on how to set Dates and Times used in parameter fields to UK format (dd/MM/yyyy).

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