Robert Bruckner's Advanced Reporting Services Blog : Rendering

SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP – What’s New In Reporting Services?

Robert M. Bruckner — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:30:00 GMT

The November CTP download is available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The public download is available here.

The feature pack download is now also available and includes Report Builder 3.0 as well as the RS add-ins for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

The Data Platform Insider blog provides an overview of what's new in CTP release for SQL Server 2008 R2. If you are reading my blog, you are probably interested in knowing what’s specifically new compared to the previous August CTP in Reporting Services 2008 R2 November CTP:

Report Part Gallery
The ability for report items / data regions to be published to the report server and made available to other report authors to re-use. Report authors can publish and share these report components from either BIDS or Report Builder 3.0. Information workers can use Report Builder to mash these report components together into their own unique views by simple drag & drop. This includes notifications when a report part was updated on the report server in the meantime.
Shared Data Sets
Datasets can now be shared, stored, processed and cached externally from the report. Cache refresh plans let you cache reports or shared dataset query results on first use or from a schedule.
Enhanced SharePoint Integration for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010
This includes support for multiple SharePoint Zones, the SharePoint Universal Logging service, and Report Parts. We added a new SharePoint List data extension with query designer support. Furthermore, support for right-to-left text with Arabic and Hebrew was added in the SharePoint user interface.
New Data Visualization Report Items
Data Bars - each bar is scaled based on the maximum value of the immediate group (a default which can be adjusted).
Sparklines are data-intense, word-sized graphics. These visualizations make it possible for report consumers to quickly see things like trends over time at a glance.
Indicators are small icons that are often used to depict the status or trend for a given value. Setting up indicators based on a number of pre-configured sets is now very easy.
Furthermore, this CTP includes improvements to the Map wizard.
Enhanced Business Intelligence Development Studio
Support for 2008 and 2008 R2 versions of reports and report projects.
Aggregates of Aggregates
This enables report authors to nest RDL aggregate expressions inside other RDL aggregate expressions with unlimited nesting levels. For example, the expression =Avg(Sum(Sales, "Month"), "Year") would compute the average total monthly sales.
Other RDL Expression Language enhancements
Expect more details on many of these topics in separate blog postings:
- Writing expressions that take into account the current rendering format (=Globals!RenderFormat.Name)
- Naming pages, including naming of Excel worksheets for Excel export
- Group.DomainScope is quite useful for synchronizing data visually across different charts / sparklines and in tablix even if data is only available at disparate granularities.
- Read/Write report variables with automatic serialization/persistence; these are quite useful to avoid managing your own custom code variables.
- Rotating Text 270 Degrees, which is frequently needed for narrow column layouts.
- Dynamic page breaks, as well as resetting page number of page breaks
New 2010 SOAP Endpoint
While the existing 2005/2006 SOAP endpoints are still supported, the 2010 endpoint unifies support of both native & SharePoint integrated servers and adds functionality for new areas such as shared datasets, cache refresh plans, and report parts.
Improved Browser and Standards Mode Support

During the next weeks I plan to cover a lot more details regarding the areas listed above.

Enjoy!

I look forward to hearing your feedback on Reporting Services 2008 R2 November CTP in the dedicated MSDN discussion forum.

Reports As Data Feeds for Gemini

Robert M. Bruckner — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:10:00 GMT

Donald Farmer explains in this one minute video how report data feeds (“the orange button”) are simply great data sources for further analysis in Gemini. You get the benefits of both, Reporting Services as platform with all its reporting and management features (e.g. role-based security, cache refresh) and Gemini as powerful analysis tool.

Enjoy!

SQL Server 2008 R2 August CTP – What’s New In Reporting Services?

Robert M. Bruckner — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:59:00 GMT

The August CTP download is available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The public download is now also active here.

The Data Platform Insider blog provides an overview of what's new in this first public CTP release for SQL Server 2008 R2. If you are reading my blog, you are probably interested in knowing what’s new in Reporting Services 2008 R2, and already in August CTP:

Map and spatial data visualization
We provided sneak previews of this functionality at past conferences, including a popular “BI Power Hour” demo. Maps can be very powerful visualizations. They can consume and visualize geospatial and geometry data directly (as shown by Ed Katibah here), “regular” data, and combine multiple datasets using map layers. Maps can integrate ESRI shape files, as well as directly integrate with Bing Maps. More details in upcoming postings.
Report Builder 3.0
The most notable new Report Builder feature area already available in the August CTP is the so-called "server mode":
- An edit session concept enables support for embedded data source credentials, relative references, and subreport references when connected to a report server.
- Dataset results are cached when connected to a report server, which speeds up making layout changes and previewing the new report.
ATOM data feeds
Reports are now also available in the ATOM standard compliant format that can be consumed by Gemini and other tools.
Update: Teo Lachev takes an initial look at data feeds here.
AJAX Report Viewer
The August CTP provides a preview of some of the functionality that will be available in the stand-alone report viewer control with the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 release. You will notice a more fluid navigation experience in August CTP.
Report Manager
Report Manager received visual and functional improvements with SharePoint-like interaction and menus.
Update: Teo Lachev provides his take on report manager with screenshots here.
RDL Expression Language enhancements
We added direct geospatial data & function support, as well as three types of Lookup functions (Lookup, LookupSet, MultiLookup). More about this in upcoming postings.

On top of that, there are several more new Reporting Services and RDL features available in August CTP, including a few in combination with Gemini and SharePoint in a limited CTP program only. During the next weeks and months I plan to cover more details on the major areas listed above, and perhaps some of the other additions like report sections.

Enjoy!

I look forward to hearing your feedback on Reporting Services 2008 R2 August CTP in the dedicated new MSDN discussion forum.

Take Another Look at CSV Rendering in RS 2008

Robert M. Bruckner — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:30:00 GMT

If you used the CSV renderer in previous releases of Reporting Services, you might want to take another look in RS 2008. We listened to your feedback: not only does CSV rendering consume significantly less resources and is faster in most cases, the CSV data output is generally more useful as well if you use complex report layouts (e.g. matrix).

As in previous releases, the CSV renderer output is customizable via device info settings and the data output is controlled by the DataElementOutput setting on reportitems and groups. For more information about report design considerations for CSV check the documentation.

One common question I have seen related to CSV output is how to configure different field or record delimiters. We improved this in RS 2008 so that you can specify special characters, such as tab or newline, directly in the report server's configuration file (RSReportServer.config). For example, to configure ASCII encoding and tab field delimiters in RS 2008 use the following settings:

        <OverrideNames>
          <Name Language="en-US">CSV (tab delimited)</Name>
        </OverrideNames>
        <Configuration>

<Encoding>ASCII</Encoding>

</DeviceInfo>

</Configuration>

</Extension>

Note: when using a server-wide device info configuration, special characters used as delimiters should be specified encoded. While this works fine in RS 2008, for RS 2005 please follow the approach described in the documentation.

Do You ▖ Unicode in PDF?

Robert M. Bruckner — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 06:20:00 GMT

One of the changes we included in Cumulative Update #1 for SQL Server 2008 (CU1 download link) is automatic full font embedding and subsetting for Unicode characters in Reporting Services 2008 PDF rendering.

While a similar code change is now available for Reporting Services 2005 PDF rendering with SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3 download link), it is not full font embedding like RS 2008. Specifically, in RS 2005 if your text contains Latin characters only, no font embedding is happening. The font embedding in RS 2005 SP3 is limited to non ANSI characters.

Overall, with font embedding it does no longer matter what version of a font is installed on a client - the documents can be viewed the same way regardless of client operating systems, font versions, and client PDF viewer. Generating multi-lingual reports and using fonts such as MingLiU just got a little bit easier.