Reporting Services & VSLive! Miscellany

Maxim Karpov has a nice post about his VSLive! experience. Max is a bright guy and a blast to hang out with.

I’m still tying up lose ends and requests for information from my presentation on SQL Server Reporting Services Integration.

If you have any performance or exporting problems, make sure you have Service Pack 1 in place. To determine the version of Reporting Services, go to the base URL for the report server (typically http://machinename/reportserver/). At the bottom of the browser page will be the version number - 8.00.878.00 is SP1.

To see what is the future holds with Service Pack 2, see Geoff Snowman’s webcast: “New Features in Reporting Services Service Pack 2”. We are still waiting for the blog to update, Geoff.

In ASP.NET we are used to sorting data in a DataGrid by clicking on a column header. This same functionality is difficult to achieve in SSRS, but see MSFTie Bruce Johnson’s newsgroup post to see one approach (copy out the inline RDL and paste into a new report). I believe sorting will be much easier to implement in the 2005 version of Reporting Services.

If you have the Enterprise edition of Reporting Services and want to look at custom authentication schemes, try the article “Using Forms Authentication in Reporting Services” for some background information and a code to build on. Also, there is a data processing extension to read XML files on GotDotNet.

Finally, there are some articles here on OdeToCode to help with learning the web service API:

• Introduction To Role-Based Security In SQL Server Reporting Services
• Authentication, Authorization, and SQL Server Reporting Services
• Using GetReportParameters
• Using CreateSubscription
• Tree Navigation Sample

For anyone looking on information on setting up Kerberos delegation with ASP.NET, I have a post in the works for that topic…