public Me : ITyson: Business Intelligence

If you’re using SQL Server Reporting Services 2008R2 and have configured it to use SSL but are having issues in Report Manager where the context menus and other links are non-SSL, read on. Apparently when you follow the simple steps to enable SSL with a certificate that you’ve installed on your Report Manager machine, they don’t point out that you need to remove the the port 80 URL otherwise Report Manager links won’t always be https! Follow the steps below to fix this issue.

1. Open the Report Service Configuration Manager.

2. Go to the Web Service URL tab on the left. Click the Advanced… button. Remove the HTTP identity of the report server. Click OK.

After it is removed for the Web Server you should see the following.

3. Now navigate to the Report Manager URL. Click the Advanced… button. Remove the HTTP identity of the report server. Click OK.

After it is removed for the Web Server you should see the following.

SSRS Will Not Let You Upload RDLs of Certain Sizes

Not sure exactly how we ran into this, but for some reason one of our 2008 Reporting Services servers would only allow us to upload RDLs that were less than ~105k. Couldn’t find much online so we ended up calling Microsoft to figure out what the deal was. Turns out here is a registry key that needs to be in place to remedy this situation.

Location: \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP\Parameters

Add a REG_DWORD with the name MaxRequestBytes and a hex value of 500000. You will be able to upload larger RDLs now.

VS2010 And SSRS Report Viewer Hanging

The other day I needed to integrated Reporting Services reports with a web application. I knew I wanted to use the ReportViewer control, but I ran into a few issues of which I’ll state here. Briefly, one issue is that the web application was already an ASP.NET MVC application, so I wanted to see if I could get the control to work with a view. I tried to wrap the control in a <form runat=server>, because it needs viewstate, etc Some ASP.NET controls will work just fine in MVC, no biggy, but this one is a no go. So I was left with using webforms, not the ideal, but that’s what I had to work with. So the big issue I ran into was that the ReportViewer control would hang and never load a report. It turns out that they made some fixes to the async rendering behavior. To avoid having the report hang you need to set report properties on the initial page post only, as shown below.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (!IsPostBack)
    {
        rptViewer.ServerReport.ReportPath = "/MyReportFolder/My Report";
        rptViewer.ServerReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri("http://SomeRptServerName/ReportServer/");
    }
}

Reporting Services Alternating Row Colors

Reporting Services is a easy way to produce good reports with little effort. A common tablature based report style is to have rows of alternating color. This eases the readers eyes when it comes to visually scanning and extracting data row by row. In order to alternate the row color, you need to give the BackgroudColor property of the row a formula to determine which color to apply. Here is a basic formula to switch colors between white and gray.

=iif(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "White", "Gainsboro")

The UI property window would look like the image shown below, where the red arrow points to the tables highlighted row.