I have been working with SSRS for 2 years now in a SQL 2008 R2 environment. I have been using Visual Studio 2008 BIDS interface to develop and maintain reports. Frankly, I am appalled by the quality of this software and it's Preview option. I have been documenting my gripes (reached number 48). Simple things like unsupported copy/paste using keyboard shortcuts, appalling error reporting, very flaky subreport concept, awful intellisense, missing undo option in many circumstances etc etc. I have lost many hours of development time working around issues such as these. I am dumbfounded as to how software could ever be released in such a state.
Anyway, I currently have no option to move from the SQL 2008 R2 environment but I am wondering whether, if I start to use the Visual Studio 2010 environment as my IDE (rather than Visual Studio 2008) whether I might see any improvements?
Any help with this would be appreciated and thank you in advance.
Related
I have a problem that started Monday (10/1/18) where the query designer for report projects (*.rptproj) has changed, I believe to the Report Builder Visual Designer. This has the unfortunate effect of me having to use the Text-Based Designer for managing the dataset query in the report, which is less than optimal.
When I try to change out of the Text-Based Designer, I get this message:
This happens for all our reports in our Reporting project. Has anyone else run into this issue? All of my Google-Fu attempts to find a solution have failed.
From what I can tell, the Microsoft Reporting Services Projects extension in VS was updated on 9/28/18, but I don't see anything in the change log for such a change. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Thanks to #B1313, his answer has to his question has done the trick for me.
Microsoft Reporting Services Projects Visual Studio 2017 Extension 2.0 Downgrade to 1.24
We currently use Report Builder with ColdFusion. This Report Builder hasn't seen any Adobe development in around 5 years and doesn't look like it will see any soon.
I need a scalable reporting solution that will work in the cloud without huge licencing implications. I've looked at Crystal (which I don't understand the pricing or what I need) and JasperReports with iReport, and I guess that Microsoft SQL Reporting is an option also.
I'd like to get some recommendations on what people are using and how you have integrated that into ColdFusion. I appreciate that it may not be as seamless as Report Builder.
We are using Windows 2008 R2 with SQL Server 2008 in a Cloud infrastructure.
What ever solution we come up with, the resulting output of the reports need to be PDF.
I've used Crystal, SQL Report Builder and ColdFusion Report Builder.
Crystal and SQL Report Builder are much better than ColdFusion Report Builder. Like you said CF is not going anywhere and is really buggy to me.
Crystal is great but it becomes really expensive when you want to publish reports to the web. The standard product requires a report viewer that is installed locally. If you need to publish to the web it is much more expensive.
SQL Report Builder is a really good option. Version 3.0 is really nice and makes it very easy to write advanced SQL queries or call SPs and publish to the web.
I am a pretty big fan of SQL Report Builder.
Hope this helps.
I'm new to SSRS and I've been using Report Builder to create reports. But I understand Visual Studio is a better environment and/or would like to use BIDS -- problem is, I cannot find our SQL server DVD or key (which I assume I need for something), but I would like to know if I can at least use Visual Studio Standard on my PC to create reports and publish them to SSRS?
Thanks
Yes you can.
BIDS is a Visual Studio plug-in.
I can't believe this - I just starting developing an SSRS report, using a SQL 2008 Report Server project in VS 2008. When I try to render the report in the VS 2008 ReportViewer control, I get this error
The report definition is not valid. Details: The report definition has an
invalid target namespace
'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2008/01/reportdefinition'
which cannot be upgraded."
I understand the error, and it has been well-documented all over the web over the past year and a half or so, but can it be that there is still no way of viewing these reports in the latest ReportViewer control? In other words, all these announcements from last year that MS would release an updated ReportViewer control in Q1 of 2009 that can render SSRS 2008 reports were wrong?
The only workaround is to install SQL Server 2005 RS? How have others solved this? Switch to VS 2010? Can I register the 2010 ReportViewer control with my VS2008 project, and is that going to solve the problem? So many questions, but no answers ...
Unfortunately, that is indeed the truth :-(
See Bill Vaughn's Retraction: The ReportViewer Control Does NOT Support SQL Server 2008 RDL in Local Mode for more details.
Hard to believe - but true :-( Let's hope it'll be better in Reporting Services for SQL Server 2010 - eerrghh... 2008 R2 :-)
Marc
I found this extremely old document which appears to say that many of the web client features are not availiable when running on express edition--scheduling, subscription, etc--as well as no access to the report builder. Is that information still current, and are there any other features which are unavailable?
Subscriptions and scheduling are indeed absent in both MSSQLEx2005 and MSSQLEx2008, but I have never found this to be much of a problem. The underlying platform has a scheduler and the web service will do all the rendering, so you can recreate the missing elements without too much trouble.
The report builder is also absent, and this is non-trivial to replicate. You could always install SQLEx locally and let them use BIDS. Or you could stop being cheap. It's pretty good for free.
I recommend you use SSRS2008 rather than 2005 because it no longer requires IIS, and there are several sexy new capabilities in the report engine. In particular it now supports flow-based rich text with inline fields for mail-merge type reports.
Compatibility is excellent but some applications reject a newer database engine version. If this is a problem, continue to use SQLExpr2005 for the database.
So, are you saying that A) SSRS 2005
requires IIS whereas 2008 does not,
and that B) SSRS2008 is backwards
compatible with a SQL2005 database?
(It sounds like you might be saying
that SSRS 2008 could be used with
somebody running 2005 DBs
Yes, I am indeed saying that
SSRS 2005 requires IIS whereas 2008 does not
SSRS 2008 is backwards compatible with a SQL2005 database
SSRS 2008 could be used with somebody running 2005 DBs, or even 2000 DBs.
You can use SSRS with any database server for which ADO.NET drivers are available, including Oracle and MySQL.
I've caught somewhere the idea about rich text in SSRS 2008.
As I see it will allow me to make such static text
"Some test with some text in bold and some italic text"
with a single text box which was impossible in RS 2005. (even don't know good way to make it there)
You wrote it doesn't require SQL Server 2008 to be installed.
What about IDE for reports development ?
Looking forward with big hopes for SSRS 2008,
thanks for attention in advance,
Alex