RS Tracer

Robert M. Bruckner — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:10:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered what API calls Report Manager or Management Studio are performing to accomplish certain operations?

Teo Lachev’s RsTracer helps answer these questions. The tool is available as a CodePlex project and shows the APIs that a Reporting Services client invokes and what arguments it passes to each interface. It also intercepts the server response. Armed with this information, you can easily reproduce the same feature in your custom management application. RsTracer works with all versions of Reporting Services.

BIDS Helper, RS Scripter

Robert M. Bruckner — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:15:00 GMT

I wanted to point out two Reporting Services utilities built by our MVPs and user community that you may find very useful.

BIDS Helper is a CodePlex project: http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper

In past releases, the focus has been on significantly enhancing Analysis Services and Integration Services BIDS design experiences. Version 1.4 was just released, and for the first time BIDS Helper now also includes small Report Designer enhancements:
- identifying unused datasets in the report (by removing them you may speed up your report)
- deleting dataset cache files (.rdl.data) directly from within BIDS

RS Scripter is a utility for scripting and managing report server catalog items: http://www.sqldbatips.com/showarticle.asp?ID=62

You might find RS Scripter particularly useful for:
- quickly and easily extracting all RDLs from a report server
- generating scripts to load reports, data sources
- script shared schedules, subscriptions, system and item level roles
- migrating contents from one report server to another

Robert Bruckner's Advanced Reporting Services Blog : Utilities

RS Tracer

BIDS Helper, RS Scripter