I just tried to rename one of the reports, what should be an easy thing to do, but I got this really weird error message:

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: An error occurred within the report server database.  This may be due to a connection failure, timeout or low disk condition within the database. —> Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.ReportServerStorageException: An error occurred within the report server database.  This may be due to a connection failure, timeout or low disk condition within the database. —> System.Exception: For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors
at Microsoft.ReportingServices.WebServer.ReportingService2005Impl.GetItemDataSources(String Item, DataSource[]& DataSources)
at Microsoft.ReportingServices.WebServer.ReportingService2006.GetItemDataSources(String Item, DataSource[]& DataSources)

This error did not make any sense to me, so I looked into the Report Server Trace Log for more info and found this:

library!ReportServer_0-11!6028!07/01/2010-14:15:39:: e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.ReportServerStorageException: An error occurred within the report server database.  This may be due to a connection failure, timeout or low disk condition within the database., ;

library!ReportServer_0-11!6c18!07/01/2010-14:15:39:: e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.ReportServerStorageException: An error occurred within the report server database.  This may be due to a connection failure, timeout or low disk condition within the database., ;

library!ReportServer_0-11!6028!07/01/2010-14:15:59:: Call to GetPermissionsAction(http://hictatriuap017/sites/DashboardsICTRA/ReportsLibrary/SLA PRD/Report Management Summary.rdl).

library!ReportServer_0-11!6c18!07/01/2010-14:15:59:: Call to GetItemDataSourcesAction(http://hictatriuap017/sites/DashboardsICTRA/ReportsLibrary/SLA PRD/Report Management Summary.rdl).

library!ReportServer_0-11!6c18!07/01/2010-14:15:59:: e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.ReportServerStorageException: An error occurred within the report server database.  This may be due to a connection failure, timeout or low disk condition within the database., ;

library!ReportServer_0-11!6c18!07/01/2010-14:15:59:: e ERROR: Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.ReportServerStorageException: An error occurred within the report server database.  This may be due to a connection failure, timeout or low disk condition within the database. —> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot insert duplicate key row in object ‘dbo.Catalog’ with unique index ‘IX_Catalog’.

The statement has been terminated.

For every report in the report library, reporting services creates a record in the Catalog table of the report server database. But when you delete a report, that record doesn’t seem to be deleted.

The catalog table has a unique index on the column “path”, that contains the full path to the report. When I tried to rename the report, it failed because a previously (deleted) report existed with that same name.

You can work around this problem by changing the value of the path column of the old record.

If anyone has more details about this problem or maybe a solution, please leave a comment.

A Parent-child hierarchy is one example of this: When you browse Parent-child hierarchy from an Analysis Services cube with Excel, Excel automatically displays it with nice drill-down functionality.

But when you add it to a Reporting Services report, you get something like this:

That’s not how we like to display a Parent-Child hierarchy to our users!

To display it with the expected drill-down you need to do some extra configuration:

The following example uses the AdventureWorks example cube available on CodePlex:

Create a new report and add a dataset with the following MDX query:

SELECT NON EMPTY { [Measures].[Amount] } ON COLUMNS,

NON EMPTY { (DESCENDANTS([Organization].[Organizations].[Organization Level 01].ALLMEMBERS) ) }

DIMENSION PROPERTIES MEMBER_CAPTION, MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME, PARENT_UNIQUE_NAME,

LEVEL_NUMBER ON ROWS

FROM [Adventure Works]

CELL PROPERTIES VALUE, BACK_COLOR, FORE_COLOR, FORMATTED_VALUE, FORMAT_STRING,

FONT_NAME, FONT_SIZE, FONT_FLAGS

Add a Tablix to your report and drag the parent-child hierarchy “Organizations” en the fact “Amount” to the Detail Row of the Tablix.

To enable drill-down you need to edit the Group Properties of the Row Group:

Configure the group to iterate on the UniqueName of “Organizations”:

Go to the Advanced options and set the property “Recursive Parent” to the ParentUniqueName of “Organizations”.

Change the visibility of this Group to “Hide” and check the option “Display can be toggled by this report item”. The toggle item should be the Textbox containing the Parent-Child hierarchy.

Now optimize the layout by increasing the indent for the lower levels of the hierarchy:

In the Textbox properties: set the following expression for “Padding – Left”:

=Cstr(Fields!Organizations.LevelNumber * 10) & “pt”

Click Preview to test the report.

Look’s way better isn’t it?

I came to the conclusion that the server always returned this error after exactly 2 minutes, so it had to be a timeout exception.

The report was kind of big, so tuning it would not really help (enough).

I took me some time to find out which timeout setting to change, because there seem be a lot of them:

There is the Query Execution timeout of the Dataset, a Report Execution timeout, the Connection timeout of IIS, other timeouts in the Report Server Configuration file, …

But the real cause of this timeout is an Execution timeout of Sharepoint.

You can change this timeout setting in the web.config of your Sharepoint site, by default in c\:inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80.

In this web.config you will find an XML node called “httpRuntime”. In this node you have to add an extra tag: executionTimeout=”9000″:

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”51200″ executionTimeout=”9000″ />

Save and close the file and do an IISReset. When you run the report again, you won’t get this error anymore.

I also checked the web.config of the Report Manager, but in Native Mode this seems to be the default:

Good luck!

• Opening Keynote by Wesley Backelant and Ritchie Houtmeyers
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• How New.NET Development technologies could change the live of the SQL DBA guy/girl by Gill Cleeren & Kurt Claeys
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Have fun!

After installing and configuring R2, I opened Internet Explorer and entered the URL of the Report Manager. In my case: http://localhost/reports_r2

I got a very empty Report Manager :

Okay, something is wrong. I tried to connect to http://localhost/reportserver_r2 :

No access? But I am admin of this PC… Wait a minute. By default, programs are never executed as an administrator in Windows 7 or Vista. That explains it!

Here is how you can solve this:

• Open Internet Explorer as an administrator: click right and select “Run as Administrator”.
• Click “Yes” to allow.

Now, if you don’t want to do this every time you want to use the report manager, follow these steps:

• Add “http://localhost” to the trusted sites.
• On the home page of the report manager click “Folder Settings”, “Security” and make your account “Content Manager”.
• Click “Site Settings”, “Security” and make your account “System Administrator”.
• Problem solved!

For more info: search for “How to: Configure a Report Server for Local Administration on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008” in BooksOnline.

Ever tried to change the URL of the Report Manager in IIS using host headers?

I did, but got the following error message when I tried to open the Report Manager:

“The request failed with HTTP status 400: Bad Request”

There is some extra configuration needed to make this work:

Edit the RSWebApplication.config file to update the report server URL, that Report Manager uses to connect to the report server:

• Delete the default entry in ReportServerVirtualDirectory
• Type the new URL using host headers in ReportServerURL

The configuration should look like this:

http://myhostheader/reportserver

Now, if you want to be able to open the Report Manager also on the machine hosting the Reporting Services website, you need to make some changes to the Registry, to add an exception to the loopback check security featurethat is designed to help prevent reflection attacks on your computer. If not, authentication will fail with the following error message:

“HTTP 401.1 – Unauthorized: Logon Failed”

To add the exception follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0

3. Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value.
4. Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the IISAdmin service.

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 “<State>$base64$”
- Open the solution
- Delete the source control bindings
- Add it to source control again

- Done!

Davy Knuysen

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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: =<AssemblyName>.<ClassName>.<StaticMethodName>

·         To call an instance method: =Code.<InstanceName>.<PublicMethodName>

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

(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:

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

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…

The first possible reason I could think of was SP1 for SQL Server 2005 which was not installed yet when the reports were created.
After some searching on the support site of Microsoft, I found this KB

It’s not available for download, but you can contact Microsoft Product Support Services to obtain the hotfix or wait for SP2.