Imagine Think Create Share : Reporting Services

Migration from Microsoft Access to SharePoint

carloshm — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:54:00 GMT

Hi,

Yesterday I was asked about migration paths for Access applications. Yes, there are still a spread active group (usually at the department level).

I have worked with several alternatives, however at the end you should consider four main requirements:

Security (Custom, AD, Sec. trim.)
UI (Access, Web [native or host in SharePoint], Custom)
App complexity (custom code, reports, linked data)
Data (volume, API)

and the requirements of your organization.

I would recommend you create some Proof of concepts and evaluate which is best for your enviornment.

With this you may come to some conclusions:

Migrate Data to SQL and mantain Access UI.

This will use, depending on versions, different Migration for Microsoft Access Tools
After migration some review will be needed (issues).

Migrate Data to SQL and develop new UI or stay with the current custom UI.

You can find several Third party solution apart from our own tools [above]. I like the approach of PCA (not really the Oracle section) but you can find many more at Solution Finder

Migrate Data to SharePoint and mantain Access UI.

This will require migration to MS Access 2007, and then follow SharePoint Migration Wizard.
This has some limitations and you need to review some changes in the data model

Migrate Data to SharePoint and develop new UI or stay with the current custom UI.

It will depend on the complexity of your UI+Business Logic, but it will require extra work to do this as previous.

In those scenarios, you may need other tools as Reports migration into Reporting Services or migration from previous versions of MS Access.

Finally, you should think in coexistence, and look for strategies or third party solutions to get this.

I received a question about SLAM, this may work well with some applications, mixing [1,2] and [3,4] scenarios; so you really design a SharePoint solution and sync with a database model.

Is there any third party tool that may help me to the overall process?

There is no magic tool, so besides the tools linked; you should review Partners directory.

Or pehaps just wait to some preview of Office 2010 and check if there are some specific improvement in the integration with MS Access.

Namaste!

Planning to Migrate from Crystal Reports to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services?

carloshm — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:38:00 GMT

Hi,

Just to let you know, that you have new resources available to help you migrate from Crystal Reports to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services at:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/whitepapers/migrate-crystal-to-reporting-services.mspx

It is a great work with screenshots and descriptive steps in order to create the reports.

Cheers!

SQL

PDf Fonts & Overlapping items in Reporting Services

carloshm — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:55:00 GMT

Hi,

I just wanted to share some answers to one of our customers that perhaps are going and going in the RS world.

They were seen some rendering 'problems':

overlapping rectangles
fonts in pdf been changed

We have several references in the documentation about this:

HTML does not support overlapping items, and will position these items next to each other on the page. To determine the position of overlapping items, the rendering extension first considers the value of the Top element for the items, then the value of the Left element, and then the value of ZIndex

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159193.aspx

When the report server generates a report in PDF format, it uses the information stored in the font referenced by the report to create character mappings within the PDF file. If the referenced font is not installed on the report server, the resulting PDF file might not contain the correct mappings and might not display correctly when viewed. In addition, the computer that is used to view the report must also have the correct font installed. If the font is not installed, the report might not display correctly.

Differences in PDF output occur most often when the report uses Arial and it includes non-Latin characters. Before deploying the report on a production server, you should test the PDF rendering output on client computers to verify that the report is rendered correctly.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159713.aspx

You can check Design Considerations for Report Rendering http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms156268(SQL.90).aspx

for these topics or do your own rendering extension if you want more ;)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms153624.aspx

From my point of view the aproach RS takes is great, as the report is stored in a render-aware format, so you can work (or 3rd parties) develop other renders and the product team can refine and support future/current formats with no change in the arquitecture.

On the other hand we should check sometimes that there could be features that some formats does not support (something obvious but not always :))

What's going on with RDL?

carloshm — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 16:21:00 GMT

I was thinking right now how was going on the different development around tools that generate RDL. Perhaps in the next Trivial Pursuit will appear Who designed Report Definition Language? and you should know it [:)]

It is nice to see several projects/companies involved in this type of development, as the platform (RS) is so extensible.

Some examples could be:

RDL Project
~~RDL Components~~ (WebService Extension for RS2000 too)
SofArtisans, you can even generate RDL files with officeWriter
MiniRDL

But you can always write you own after checking the doc :

You know that you can comment about any other resources available. For sure!!

RDL, RS

[Updated 26/01/2006]

WordML in Reporting Services

carloshm — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 01:54:00 GMT

Although Reporting Services is almost 22 months old, I haven't found any pure render extension yet (please comment on this[:-*]). Many people ask me 'how can I export reports in Microsoft Word format?', and I usually redirect them to our BOL. But after looking up in the RS documentation, I realized that it is not as straighforward as expected, so I will try to simplify it.

ReportingService.Render Method

You can find easily this method in the documentation , it explain how to render a built report programmatically. In our sample the most important parameters are:

Format, Reporting Services allows you to export the report from the IF to any format configure as rendering extension. So w can export by default to: XML, CSV, IMAGE (Different image format here), PDF, HTML4.0, HTML3.2, MHTML, EXCEL and HTMLOWC. We will choose XML.
DeviceInfo, it is a XML string that contains the necessary information for the rendering extension chosen above.

Then we can take a closer look to the XML Device Information Settings.

Here we have (XSLT, MIMEType, UseFormattedValues, Indented, OmitSchema, Encoding, FileExtension, Schema), I will comment the first one XSLT. It will be the path in the report server namespace of an XSLT to apply to the XML file. This means that you can upload a XSL file, and include its path here.

The approach I'm following to create Microsoft Word Format, is based on WordML Format, and you can use:

Microsoft Office Word 2003
Word Viewer 2003 (standalone application)
Word 2003: XML Viewer (Internet Explorer)
Any other application that consumes WordML.

to see the final doc.

Is there an easy way?

Well, you can follow the sample and create an application that creates a WordML file....or you can use Reporting Services URL Access and do it in a simple way.

So we follow these steps:

Create a report based on AdventureWorks2000 database, with Data Source (Check it).
Deploy them to the ReportServer
Create the XSLT to convert from XML (RS rendering) format to WordML format (Check it).
Uploaded the file transform01.xsl to MyXSLT folder
Create a URL Access with all the information:
1. http://localhost/ReportServer?
2. /RSDemos/AdW2KProducts
3. &rs:Format=XML&rs:Command=Render
4. &rc:XSLT=/MyXSLT/transform01.xsl
5. &rc:FileExtension=doc (you may try &rc:FileExtension=xml too due to the Word PI)
6. &Category=22
Access the URL (Check it).

And that's it, we have our WordML report.

We could create RTF documents following the same pattern.

What about better documentation

Yes, I know BOL RS could be better (Eyerthing can improve!), and that is the reason we heard from customers and improve the documentation (and improve the searching [;)])!

Check the MSDN / MSDN2 docs:

RS 2000: Designing for XML Output RS 2005: Designing for XML Output
RS 2000: Elements and Attributes in XML Rendering RS 2005: Elements and Attributes in XML Rendering
RS 2000: Applying Transformations to XML Output RS 2005: Applying Transformations to XML Output