Davy's Blog » .Net

SQL Server Day 2009 videos now available on Chopsticks

Davy — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:10:05 +0000

Microsoft has made the sessions presented on SQL Server Day 2009 available on Chopsticks

Opening Keynote by Wesley Backelant and Ritchie Houtmeyers
Best Practices for SQL Server Consolidation by Tom Van Mulders
Breaking the ETL world record with Integration Services by Henk van der Valk
Designing Effective Aggregations in Analysyis Services 2008 by Chris Webb
High availability for BI DWH by Patrick Tack
How New.NET Development technologies could change the live of the SQL DBA guy/girl by Gill Cleeren & Kurt Claeys
Implementing best practices with Policy Based Management by Nico Jacobs
Introducing to PowerPivot or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Excel by Chris Webb
Tracking Changes and Data movement in SQL Server 2008 by Dirk Gubbels
Handling XML in SQL Server by Nico Jacobs

Have fun!

Problem opening report solution: Project item ‘#itemn°#’ does not represent a file.

Davy — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:11:38 +0000

Today I had some problems with a report solution created in Visual Studio 2005:

After I got the latest version out of SourceSafe, I could not open it anymore. The error message was “Project item ’4294967294′ does not represent a file.”

Searching for this error on the internet I came to this solution:

- Open the .rptproj file in notepad (or another text editor) and delete the line that begins with “$base64$”
- Open the solution
- Delete the source control bindings
- Add it to source control again

- Done!

Davy Knuysen

SQL Server Reporting Services: Create and Call a Custom Assembly

Davy — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 03:51:00 +0000

In one of my previous articles I explained how to use embedded code in SQL Server Reporting Services. The possibility to add embedded code to a report, is a very powerfull feature to add some custom functionality to your report.
But sometimes it might be necessary to add some custom functionality that is too complicated for embedded code to handle efficiently, or you need to access the same function from multiple reports, or you would like to write you code in C#…
In one of these cases you should develop a custom assembly to call from your report.

Let’s start with a simple example and develop a function PercentageToColor() to return a color based on a numeric value representing a percentage.

namespace MyAssembly

{

public class Colors

{

public string PercentageToColor(double percentage)

{

string returnValue = string.Empty;

if (percentage < 20)

{

returnValue = “red”;

}

else if (percentage < 80)

{

returnValue = “blue”;

}

else

{

returnValue = “green”;

}

return returnValue;

}

Once you’ve compiled your class you need to copy the resulting assembly to the directory in which it is accessible from within your report:

· To use it in the report designer, you need to copy it to:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies

· To make it available for reports that have been deployed to the report server, you need to copy it to:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportServer\bin

Before you can access your custom assembly you have to reference the assembly: Open the report properties (Menu: Report – Report Properties) and select the References tab.

Browse to your assembly and define a Class Name and an Instance Name. (The Class Name and the Instance Name or only for non-static methods). Make sure to prefix your class name with the assembly name.

Now you can call the methods in your assembly from your report, using an expression:

· To call a static method: =..

· To call an instance method: =Code..

So in our example this would be: =Code.TestColor.PercentageToColor(Fields!Percentage.Value)

That’s it! You’ve just created and called a custom assembly from your report…

In one of my future articles I will explain how to pass parameters to the class constructor and I will also tell something about SSRS and .Net Permissions…

Davy Knuysen

Embedded Code in SQL Server Reporting Services

Davy — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 06:08:00 +0000

Sometimes it might be necessary to use the same expression on different places throughout a report. You can of course just copy and paste the expression every time you need it, but if you’ll ever need to change this expression, you will have to change it for every field you’re using it for. Therefore it’s good practice to write this expression just once and refer to it where necessary. This can be done by implementing embedded code, that can be entered through the report’s property dialog on the Code tab.

(Click “Report”, “Report Properties” and select the Code tab)

Assume you have some calculated percentage fields and you need to set the background color depending on it’s value:

- when the value is less then 20% : background must be red

- when the value is between 20 and 80%: background must be orange

- when the value is greater then 80%: background must be green

Add the following function to the custom code textbox:

Function GetColor(ByVal percentage As Double) As String

Dim returnValue As String

Select Case percentage

Case Is < 20

returnValue = “red”

Case Is < 80

returnValue = “orange”

Case Is > 80

returnValue = “green”

End Select

Return returnValue

End Function

Now you can access this function as a member of the class called “Code”:

=Code.GetColor(Fields!CalculatedPercentage.Value)

The Embedded Code Window is a very handy tool to quickly add some easy functions to your report.

But at this time, Embedded Code only supports Visual Basic and the Embedded Code Window is nothing more then a large textbox, without Intellisense or any debugging info.

Embedded Code can also only be reached from within the same report.

Therefore if you want multiple reports to access the same code, or you would like to write your code in C#, or do some really advanced things, you should consider accessing a .NET assembly from the embedded code, which I will explain in one of my future articles…