I'm a newbie when it comes to SSDT and connecting to TFS to create reports. One of the reports that I generate twice a day is a very manual process. I'd like to automate it or at least try. I'm having a hard time finding a step by step guide that shows how to use SSDT to connect to TFS 2015 and use WIT queries.
The example that anyone sends me can be very simple. I have some workitem queries in TFS that return the data.
One query returns all Critical 1 bugs and the other query returns High 2 bugs.
How to I use those queries to build the report in SSRS? Do I connect to the TFS_Datawarehouse or to the TFS_Analysis in the reporting server?
If you mean custom reports with SSRS, then you can reference below samples:
Using Custom Reports in TFS: Part 3 – How to set up my reporting
environment and structure
TFS Reports using SSRS
More information about the TFS report you can refer to below links:
Create and manage Reporting Services reports
Add reports to a team project
How To: Create a Custom Report for Visual Studio Team Foundation
Server
Creating and Customizing TFS Reports
It is not the first time this question has been asked, but no solution has been found yet. The only thread I found somewhat relevant was this but it is 4 years old: SSRS Reports Versioning
Perhaps a solution has been found since then?
Back to my questions:
I have several reports in a Visual Studio solution (BIDS). From here I can deploy to several reporting servers: Test1, Test2 and Production.
1) It seems that the granularity of deployment is: Reports, Datasets and Datasources. This can be setup in Properties for the solution. But I want to be able to only deploy a single report, if I only have changes to one report. How do I do this? As it is now it seems that I have to deploy ALL reports.
2) Since I have more than 1 place to deploy there is a possibility of the reports getting out of sync. Normally the procedure would be to deploy the reports to Test until everything is fine, and thereafter deploy to Production. But since this is a manual process something can go wrong. Therefore I believe it would be nice to have some sort of versioning on the individual reports. But I can find no way of doing this? I'm thinking that it would be really nice if a timestamp and/or versionnumber could be set on the reports when they are deployed. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks in advance.
How about putting the version number of the report on the report itself? You would need to run the report to see it though.
To deploy a single report, right-click on the report name and Deploy to deploy that report (or dataset or data source).
As far as the deployment issues, you can use version control such as Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/tfs-overview-vs.aspx
I'm having trouble figuring this out.
I stopped ALL of local SQL Services, e.g. SQL Server, SQL Agent, Reporting Services. Then using Report Builder 2.0 to create a report connecting to a remote SQL Server (No SSRS running) out in the farm. When I click on "Run" button, for some odd reasons, it still render the report.
I thought you must have SSRS running in the first place. Is SQL Reporting Services even required for Report Builder?
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alt text http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?0bf8bb1f1d.jpg
When Reporting Services runs a report, it creates a data file of the data used in the report and, if nothing changes, it uses that data the next time the report runs instead of hitting the server again. You could be seeing the cached data.
Look where the report is kept. There will be a report file, say MyReport.rdl and also the data, MyReport.rdl.data. You could delete that data file otherwise simply changing the report parameters (if you have some) will generally cause the report to disregard the cached data and make a trip to the server again.
I'm answering my own question. Here's my observation after some googling and experimenting.
Report Builder is using a stand alone report control to render report. Visual Studio.NET is probably using the same thing when preview a report. SSRS is required when developers need to incorporate web-based reporting solution, e.g. ASP.NET, as well as to manage reports.
What's really bothering me is that to author reports in VS.NET, I must be using Business Intelligence Projects. In order to do that, I must install SQL Server 2005/2008 with SSRS. Why is so when SSRS is not even required in a LOCAL environment?
I have been studying SSRS 2005 / 2008 in the past weeks and have created some server side reports. For some application, a colleague suggested that I look into RDLC for that particular situation. I am now trying to get my head around the main difference between RDL and RDLC.
Searching for this information yields fragmented information at best. I have learned that:
RDLC reports do not store information about how to get data.
RDLC reports can be executed directly by the ReportViewer control.
But I still don't fully understand the relation between the RDLC file and the other related systems (the Reporting Server, the source database, the client).
In order to get a good grasp on RDLC files, I would like to know how their use differs from RDL files and in what situation one would choose RDLC over RDL. Links to resources are also welcome.
Update:
A thread on the ASP.NET forums discusses this same issue. From it, I have gained some better understanding on the issue.
A feature of RDLC is that it can be run completely client-side in the ReportViewer control.
This removes the need for a Reporting Services instance, and even removes the need for any database connection whatsoever, but:
It adds the requirement that the data that is needed in the report has to be provided manually.
Whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage depends on the particular application.
In my application, an instance of Reporting Services is available anyway and the required data for the reports can easily be pulled from a database. Is there any reason left for me to consider RDLC, or should I simply stick with RDL?
From my experience there are few things to think about both things:
I. RDL reports are HOSTED reports generally. This means you need to implement SSRS Server. They are a built in extension of Visual Studio from SQL Server for the reporting language. When you install SSRS you should have an add on called 'Business Intelligence Development Studio' which is much easier to work with the reports than without it.
R eport
D efinition
L angauge
Benefits of RDL reports:
You can host the reports in an environment that has services running for you on them.
You can configure security on an item or inheriting level to handle security as a standalone concept
You can configure the service to send out emails(provided you have an SMTP server you have access to) and save files on schedules
You have a database generally called 'ReportServer' you can query for info on the reports once published.
You can access these reports still through 'ReportViewer' in a client application written in ASP.NET, WPF (with a winform control bleh!), or Winforms in .NET using 'ProcessingMode.Remote'.
You can set parameters a user can see and use to gain more flexibility.
You can configure parts of a report to be used for connection strings as 'Data Sources' as well as a sql query, xml, or other datasets as a 'Dataset'. These parts and others can be stored and configured to cache data on a regular basis.
You can write .NET proxy classes of the services http:// /ReportServer/ReportingService2010 or /ReportExecution2005. You can then make up your OWN methods in .NET for emailing, saving, or manipulating SSRS data from the service directly of a Server hosting SSRS reports in code.
Programmatically Export SSRS report from sharepoint using ReportService2010.asmx
Downsides:
SSRS is kind of wonkey compared to other things on getting it up fast. Most people get confused by the security policy and designing reports as an 'add on' to VS. SQL 2005 = VS BIDS 2005 , SQL 2008 = VS BIDS 2008, SQL 2012 = VS BIDS 2010(LOL).
Continuing on 1 the policy for security settings IMHO are idiotically overcomplex. There is server security, database security and roles, two security settings on the page hosted for the service. Most people only set up an admin than can't get in and wonder why other users cannot. Most common complaint or question on SSRS is related to getting in generally from my experience.
You can use 'expressions' that will supposeduly 'enhance' your report. Often times you do more than a few and your report goes to a crawl in performance.
You have a set amount of things you can do and export to. SSRS has no hover over reporting I know of without a javascript hack.
Speed and performance can take a hit as the stupid SSRS config recycles the system and a first report can take a while at times just loading the site. You can get around this by altering it but I have found making a keep alive service for it works better.
II. RDLC reports are CLIENT CONTAINED reports that are NOT HOSTED ANYWHERE. The extra c in the name means 'Client'. Generally this is an extension of the RDL language meant for use only in Visual Studio Client Applications. It exists in Visual Studio when you add a 'reporting' item.
Benefits of RDLC reports:
You can hookup a wcf service much much much more easier to the dataset.
You have more control over the dataset and can use POCO classes filled with Entity framework objects or ADO.NET directly as well as tables themselves. You can monkey with the data for optimization it before binding it to the report.
You can customize the look more with add on's directly in code behind.
Downsides:
You need to handle parameters on your own and while you can implement wrapper methods to help the legwork is a little more than expected and unfortunate.
The user cannot SEE the parameters in a 'ReportViewer' control unless it is in remote mode and accessing an RLD report. Thus you need to make textboxes, dropdowns, radio buttons on your own outside the control to pass to it. Some people like this added control, I do not personally.
Anything you want to do with servicing the reports for distribution you need to build yourself. Emailing, subscriptions, saving. Sorry you need to build that in .NET or else implement a proxy that already does that from above you could just be getting using hosted reports.
Honestly I like both for different purposes. If I want something to go out to analysts that they use all the time and tweak for graphs, charts, drill downs and exports to Excel I use RDL and just have SSRS's site do all the legwork of handling the email distributions. If I want an application that has a report section and I know that application is its own module with rules and governance I use an RDLC and having the parameters be smaller and be driven by the decisions the user made before getting to the report part of what client they are on and site and then they usually just choose a time frame or type and nothing more. So generally a complex report I would use RDL and for something simple I would use RDLC IMHO.
Q: What is the difference between RDL and RDLC formats?
A: RDL files are created by the SQL
Server 2005 version of Report
Designer. RDLC files are created by
the Visual Studio 2008 version of
Report Designer.
RDL and RDLC formats have the same XML
schema. However, in RDLC files, some
values (such as query text) are
allowed to be empty, which means that
they are not immediately ready to be
published to a Report Server. The
missing values can be entered by
opening the RDLC file using the SQL
Server 2005 version of Report
Designer. (You have to rename .rdlc to
.rdl first.)
RDL files are fully compatible with
the ReportViewer control runtime.
However, RDL files do not contain some
information that the design-time of
the ReportViewer control depends on
for automatically generating
data-binding code. By manually binding
data, RDL files can be used in the
ReportViewer control. New! See also
the RDL Viewer sample program.
Note that the ReportViewer control
does not contain any logic for
connecting to databases or executing
queries. By separating out such logic,
the ReportViewer has been made
compatible with all data sources,
including non-database data sources.
However this means that when an RDL
file is used by the ReportViewer
control, the SQL related information
in the RDL file is simply ignored by
the control. It is the host
application's responsibility to
connect to databases, execute queries
and supply data to the ReportViewer
control in the form of ADO.NET
DataTables.
http://www.gotreportviewer.com/
I have always thought the different between RDL and RDLC is that RDL are used for SQL Server Reporting Services and RDLC are used in Visual Studio for client side reporting. The implemenation and editor are almost identical. RDL stands for Report Defintion Language and RDLC Report Definition Language Client-side.
I hope that helps.
From my experience, if you need high performance (this does depend slightly on your client specs) on large reports, go with rdlc. Additionally, rdlc reports give you a very full range of control over your data, you may be able to save yourself wasted database trips, etc. by using client side reports. On the project I'm currently working on, a critical report requires about 2 minutes to render on the server side, and pretty much takes out whichever reporting server it hits for that time. Switching it to client side rendering, we see performance much closer to 20-40 seconds with no load on the report server and less bandwidth used because only the datasets are being downloaded.
Your mileage may vary, and I find rdlc's add development and maintenance complexity, especially when your report has been designed as a server side report.
Some of these points have been addressed above, but here's my 2-cents for VS2008 environment.
RDL (Remote reports): Much better development experience, more flexibility if you need to use some advanced features like scheduling, ad-hoc reporting, etc...
RDLC (Local reports): Better control over the data before sending it to the report (easier to validate or manipulate the data prior to sending it to the report). Much easier deployment, no need for an instance of Reporting Services.
One HUGE caveat with local reports is a known memory leak that can severely affect performance if your clients will be running numerous large reports. This is supposed to be addressed with the new VS2010 version of the report viewer.
In my case, since we have an instance of Reporting Services available, I develop new reports as RDLs and then convert them to local reports (which is easy) and deploy them as local reports.
If you have a reporting services infrastructure available to you, use it. You will find RDL development to be a bit more pleasant. You can preview the report, easily setup parameters, etc.
While I currently lean toward RDL because it seems more flexible and easier to manage, RDLC has an advantage in that it seems to simplify your licensing. Because RDLC doesn’t need a Reporting Services instance, you won't need a Reporting Services License to use it.
I’m not sure if this still applies with the newer versions of SQL Server, but at one time if you chose to put the SQL Server Database and Reporting Services instances on two separate machines, you were required to have two separate SQL Server licenses:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlgetstarted/thread/82dd5acd-9427-4f64-aea6-511f09aac406/
You can Bing for other similar blogs and posts regarding Reporting Services licensing.
For VS2008, I believe RDL gives you better editing features than RDLC. For example, I can change the Bold on a selected amount of text in a textbox with RDL, while in RDLC it's is not possible.
RDL: abcd efgh ijklmnop
RDLC: abcd efgh ijklmnop -or- abcd efgh ijklmnop (are your only options)
This is because RDLC is using a earlier namespace/formatting from 2005, while RDL is using 2008. This however will change with VS2010
If we have fewer number of reports which are less complex and consumed by asp.net web pages.
It's better to go with rdlc,reason is we can avoid maintaing reports on RS instance.
but we have to fetch the data from DB manually and bind it to rdlc.
Cons:designing rdlc in visual studio is little difficult compared to SSrs designer.
Pro:Maintenance is easy.
while exporting the report from we page,observed that performance gain compared to server side reports.
if you want to use report in asp.net then use .rdl
if you want to use /view in report builder / report server then use .rdlc
just by converting format manually it works
It seems very easy to deploy new reports to a reporting server directly from visual studio, however when these are to be pushed into our web farm (where developers have no access), this either needs to be done manually, report by report, through microsoft's web front end, or into an MSI.
However, from time to time we might want to reconfigure report options on the report server such as, changing the data source for all reports or changing the caching options for them. Rather than create a whole new MSI for each set of changes or do this manually I wondered if anyone knew of any alternative tools that can update multiple reports at a time or even able to deploy the contents of a folder into a folder on the reporting server.
Cheers, Chris
For Administrators, rs.exe, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162839.aspx , allows remote scripting via VBScript. If it's possible to give SOAP access, you should be able to accomplish all you want and more without resorting to an MSI.
Thanks, Jamie
Microsoft Reporting Services - Developer