Reporting Services and Scriptomatic

Saturday, February 19, 2005

This week I’m going to tie up some lose strings from my VSLive! presentation…

One can programmatically interact with Reporting Services across the network by sending requests via an URL, via a web service request (SOAP), and via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Of these three – I spend no time covering WMI because it’s typically not an interface used to deliver features to end users. I’ll provide some more information here.

In general, WMI exposes classes to configure and mange both hardware and software on computers throughout the network. Reporting Services provides WMI classes that let us query and make changes to report server configurations.

WMI is one of those pieces of software that requires a reference manual nearby unless you work with it everyday, but there is a very easy way to get started: Scriptomatic 2.0. Just pick a WMI class and the tool will code-gen a runnable sample script in VBScript, Jscript, Python, or Perl. Scriptomatic itself is an interesting application written as a single HTA file and run in IE.

Here is a script from Scriptomatic showing the properties of the MSReportServer_ConfigurationSetting class from the root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ReportingServices\v8 namespace:

On Error Resume Next
 
Const wbemFlagReturnImmediately = &h10
Const wbemFlagForwardOnly = &h20
 
arrComputers = Array("REPORTING")
For Each strComputer In arrComputers
   WScript.Echo
   WScript.Echo "=========================================="
   WScript.Echo "Computer: " & strComputer
   WScript.Echo "=========================================="
 
   Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & _ 
            "\root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ReportingServices\v8")
   Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
           ("SELECT * FROM MSReportServer_ConfigurationSetting", "WQL", _
            wbemFlagReturnImmediately + wbemFlagForwardOnly)
 
   For Each objItem In colItems
      WScript.Echo "DatabaseIntegratedSecurity: " & _ 
                       objItem.DatabaseIntegratedSecurity
      WScript.Echo "DatabaseLogonName: " & objItem.DatabaseLogonName
      WScript.Echo "DatabaseLogonPassword: " & objItem.DatabaseLogonPassword
      WScript.Echo "DatabaseLogonTimeout: " & objItem.DatabaseLogonTimeout
      WScript.Echo "DatabaseName: " & objItem.DatabaseName
      WScript.Echo "DatabaseQueryTimeout: " & objItem.DatabaseQueryTimeout
      WScript.Echo "DatabaseServerName: " & objItem.DatabaseServerName
      WScript.Echo "Impersonate: " & objItem.Impersonate
      WScript.Echo "ImpersonateDomain: " & objItem.ImpersonateDomain
      WScript.Echo "ImpersonatePassword: " & objItem.ImpersonatePassword
      WScript.Echo "ImpersonateUserName: " & objItem.ImpersonateUserName
      WScript.Echo "InstallationID: " & objItem.InstallationID
      WScript.Echo "InstanceName: " & objItem.InstanceName
      WScript.Echo "PathName: " & objItem.PathName
      WScript.Echo "UnattendedExecutionLogonDomain: " & _ 
                      objItem.UnattendedExecutionLogonDomain
      WScript.Echo "UnattendedExecutionLogonName: " & _
                      objItem.UnattendedExecutionLogonName
      WScript.Echo "UnattendedExecutionLogonPassword: " & _
                      objItem.UnattendedExecutionLogonPassword
      WScript.Echo "VirtualRoot: " & objItem.VirtualRoot
      WScript.Echo
   Next
Next
 
 

If you’d rather have the code in .NET, then the System.Management namespace contains all the WMI goo. WMI is probably underutilized due to the quirky mixture of SQL like syntax with a namespace traversed like a file system. It seems powerful, and it’s something I need to keep in mind next time I need a configuration script.

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OdeToCode by K. Scott Allen