Does the API enable the exporting of activity and task hours estimates (or other custom report data)?
I'm interested in building some custom reporting using exported data, and want to determine if it's worth the trouble to learn how to use the API.
If so, can anyone point me to the best source for how to use an API like this? I've used Microsoft APIs in the past where you just go to a website and it returns a CSV.
Thanks!
Related
I hope someone here can help.
I have a requirement from my client who is an ISV. They want to develop a solution whereby they want to offer their customer an ability to create any reports from the customer specific database.
What I mean is, we publish the dataset on a portal the customer can then drag and drop the tables they needed, create the joins to create the required report.
Is it possible to do this in PowerBi or SQL Server Reporting service?
Many Thanks
Service Content Pack
It is possible in Power BI by developing an online service content pack. This allows online services to give their customers insight into their own data via the PowerBI.com cloud service. The ISV pre-builds the data model (and some initial charts); the end user doesn't have to worry about joins at all. They can drag & drop the fields that the ISV makes available.
There are some base requirements (it has to be a SaaS application that has an API accessible via the public internet).
More information: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-developer-content-pack-overview/
Embedding
If the ISV is building their own portal, they can embed SSRS reports on their own website (and use parameters that pass the customer ID from the website directly to each report). This looks like a good place to start: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/reporting-services/application-integration/integrating-reporting-services-into-applications. One downside to this solution is that SSRS doesn't allow the end-user to change the reports themselves (no dragging or dropping fields).
You can also embed Power BI reports onto an externally facing website. More information here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi-embedded/
There may be other solutions, such as tools that allow external access directly into SSAS, but I've limited the scope of my response to the two tools you've asked about (SSRS and Power BI).
We have a situation where we need to modify the data being returned by CRM. This was implemented within the application using plug-ins so every aspect of user interaction was managed.
However, in SSRS reports, these plug-ins are not being called. We have investigated a number of other messages (such as execute), but haven't really come up with a viable solution as of yet. A post here which suggested the use of javascript code is not viable since we have a large number of reports.
If there is anyone who has insight on this please let me know. TIA.
You are not the only person who scratched head trying to figure out why it happens and after investigating their reporting extension I discovered that data is fetched directly from SQL without usage of endpoint (so plugins are not triggered). FetchXml internally transformed to SQL.
Im trying to solve an issue in MVC4.
Background:
We have an existing asp.net web application where we have reports section. These are rdlc files with datasource and dataset configured to use an SP to populate the rows which is tied to an aspx view. All these are regular stuff. We have migrated the existing application to MVC rest based web app and apis. Here, the web app send/receive data in json format and used in view accordingly.
Problem to solve:
the data required for the report to show is coming from one of the rest apis which returns json object. The report (.rdlc) traditionally connects to a DB, but in my case, the data is in json. How will I go about mapping the json data to the report view?
Searched lot of forums for couple of days, no real success. Inputs greatly appreciated.
We have the same situation for our ASP.Net MVC application where the RESTful web services pass back JSON data to the front end applications. The MVC application doesn't just provide data, it applies business rules to the data before passing it back and these business rules can't be applied at the database level. So reporting is not straightforward.
We wanted to call these same web services to get the same data as the front end applications get. Fortunately SSRS is amazingly extensible. I created a custom data processing extension that calls our ASP.Net MVC controllers and returns the data, which is deserialised into datasets for use in the reports.
While not trivial, it isn't as hard as you might think and implementing a custom data processing extension is a good way to solve your problem. There are plenty of examples online to get you started. I based mine on the file share example provided with SSRS that queries a network folder and returns the file information as a dataset.
I am trying to implement a system which sends out email alerts based on certain changes in the database - for instance, if the revenue for a certain store drops below 50% of the 30-day average, we'd like to automatically generate an alert to the relevant decision makers, so they can check what's going on. (Fictional example, we don't have stores)
Does JasperReportc Server 4.5 (or any other related tool) provide any functionality which could accomplish this? If not, is there any open-source solution which would be suitable? Ideally we'd like a user-friendly frontend to define the criteria and design the alert mails.
Or can it be possible at database level?
Thanks.
I have to mention that Jasper is just a reporting tool. It does not send any email alerts or anything. All it can do is generate dynamic reports at different times.
Perhaps your application itself can use SMTP or IMAP to send emails. You can code the necessary conditions in your application itself.
You can use Jasper in your application when you want fast-building dynamic reporting solutions. It takes less time on Jasper to create a report than building it in the application. Also, Jasper can have your report exported in PDF or Excel format also without having to jack around with API files. Jasper also offers charts and other graphical reporting structures.
I am currently evaluating reporting solutions for use within my organization and one of the requirements of the solution must be 'ad hoc reporting' and is defined as 'given an existing report the user will be permitted to modify the data points of the report and, additionally, save the report for later viewing'.
I worked through a basic report using SSAS and SSRS; this certainly worked but I found it to be a little bit to involved with needing to open report builder, specify the cube that should be used, and so on not to mention that the Report Builder (SSRS2K5) is pretty vanilla. The people that will be looking at these reports are certainly not technical people and my concern is that this process will be completely overwhelming. I did find this component and it is much more user friendly since the data source can be set dynamically at runtime and all the user has to focus on is what data they want to see.
Does SSAS/SSRS offer any other methods for ad hoc reporting other than using Report Builder to connect to cubes and going from there? Does anyone know of, or used, any products similar to Active Analysis that they might recommend? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Excel 2007 and 2010 actually has connection ability to adhoc query and analyze data from an SSAS cube. Excel have a host of features that allows interaction with the cube including using pivot tables and data mining plugins to analyze the data.
simple example here:
http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertutorial/2016/using-excel-and-creating-a-pivot-table-report/
SSRS2012 Power View in Sharepoint mode (soon in Excel) - overview is here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3726.power-view-overview-en-us.aspx
Not quite sure what is meant by "user can modify the data points of the report" but with Excel 2007 / 2010 you can use the What If Analysis feature to modify the data in a pivot table. You can also combine that with Analysis Services writeback feature to enable some pretty cool data modelling functionality.
If you're looking for what I call "exploratory analysis" (i.e. you don't know what you're looking for in the analysis) then a product like our ActiveAnalysis component, PowerPivot, or Tableau are all good tools (note that a key difference being that our ActiveAnalysis is a developer component that you can cheaply embed into applications, and the other two are strictly end user tools).
However, if you have users who want to be able to create an "operational report" or they might want to customize existing reports those are probably not ideal tools. We actually created ActiveReports Server specifically for this type of scenario. It is a drag & drop business-user-friendly ad-hoc reporting tool that sounds like it might be more appropriate for the "not technical people" that it sounds like you're dealing with. It does not depend on SSAS and works all inside of a web browser, so nothing to deploy.
Scott Willeke
Product Manager | ActiveReports Server
GrapeCity