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Friday, July 31, 2009 5:09 PM

Add Excel-like "color scale" conditional formatting to your reports

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, and it looks like David Lean beat me to it earlier this year by posting an incredibly thorough four-part discussion of how to do conditional formatting in Reporting Services . I’ve played with his sample code
Posted by bobmeyers | 1 Comments
Attachment(s): ColorScales.vb.txt
Monday, April 27, 2009 4:15 PM

Localizing a report model

Reports and report models can be localized at many levels. Following are some ideas around the current support in SQL Server 2008 for each type of localization. - Localized metadata at report design time o Example : Spanish report author sees “Cliente”
Posted by bobmeyers | 0 Comments
Thursday, October 11, 2007 1:44 AM

Sorting the values in parameter dropdowns in Report Builder

In SQL 2005 the semantic queries generated by Report Builder do not support sorting. This is not a problem in the report itself, because all sorting is defined and implemented in the report definition instead of the query. However, for parameter dropdowns
Posted by bobmeyers | 2 Comments
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Attachment(s): SQLReportModelDP.zip
Tuesday, February 27, 2007 11:28 AM

Requiring Report Builder users to choose a perspective

Some customers have report models that are large enough they do not expect any user to ever request the entire model, and would actually prefer to disallow that option, and require them to choose a perspective instead. There is an undocumented and unsupported
Posted by bobmeyers | 6 Comments
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Thursday, February 22, 2007 4:04 PM

Launching Report Builder from the command line

A number of people have asked if it is possible to launch RB from the command line. While it is in fact possible, it is an unsupported feature in SQL Server 2005. That said, here's how to do it. You just need to specify what report server to connect to,
Posted by bobmeyers | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, October 31, 2006 12:12 PM

Enforcing timeouts on Report Builder queries

I've attached a sample C# project illustrating how to create a custom data processing extension ( more info ) that enforces a maximum timeout on any SQL queries submitted to it, including those generated from Report Builder. To try it out: Open and build
Posted by bobmeyers | 6 Comments
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Attachment(s): SQLTimeoutDP.zip
Thursday, September 28, 2006 11:20 AM

Creating a report model that can be used against multiple databases

Sometimes it is useful to create a report model that can be used against multiple databases that have the same structure, but reside on different servers and/or have different schema qualifiers. Uploading a second copy of a report model and pointing it
Posted by bobmeyers | 5 Comments
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Wednesday, July 05, 2006 7:10 PM

How to get the SQL for a Report Builder report

There are two ways to get the generated SQL for a Report Builder report (or for a model-based query in any RS report): 1) use SQL Profiler to capture the incoming SQL commands, or 2) enable query logging in the report server. To enable query logging on
Posted by bobmeyers | 5 Comments
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Sunday, March 26, 2006 3:57 AM

Using RDL expressions in Report Builder

While not a documented feature, you actually can enter an arbitrary RDL expression into a textbox in a Report Builder report. For example, you could add a textbox that shows the date the report was run by setting the value of the textbox to the following:
Posted by bobmeyers | 13 Comments
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Friday, March 24, 2006 6:02 PM

How to create a 'company' security filter for a hosted application

Several customers have asked how to restrict data visibility in a report model for a hosted application, where every table has a "CompanyID" column, and every user that accesses the system is associated (via some other table) with exactly one company.
Posted by bobmeyers | 3 Comments
Friday, March 24, 2006 7:51 PM

Collapsing a many-to-many relationship in a report model

Often a many-to-many relationship exists between two entities where the intermediate entity has nothing on it except the connecting roles. For example, it might be that an Employee can be assigned to many Regions, and each Region can have many Employees
Posted by bobmeyers | 8 Comments
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Saturday, October 15, 2005 6:44 AM

How to create an inline bar chart

Here's a neat trick a co-worker and I discovered this afternoon for creating an inline bar chart (an inline data visualization in a table or other data region). 1. Add an embedded image to your report that will serve as the "bar" (a simple horizontal
Posted by bobmeyers | 2 Comments
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