I’m very excited to see my first feature article published in SQL Server Pro Magazine titled Custom Programming to Enhance SSRS Reports; How to write a custom assembly and use it to build a dynamic report dataset. The article was posted online in April and featured in the July printed and electronic edition. SQL Server Pro (formerly known as “SQL Server Magazine” or “SQLMag”) is published by Penton Media and is the largest publication for the SQL Server community. Please read the article, download the code, work through the exercise and let me know if you have comments or questions.
I posted an early draft of this article in my blog last year titled Using Custom Assemblies in Reports to Generate Query Logic (parts 1 and 2). The code was cleaned-up and tech edited in the new article which I recommend as the most reliable source (not that I write bad code, mind you, but it never hurts to have a formal tech review.)
I am trying to devise a way to dynamically add category(y-axis) striplines, so I can empower users to add a stripline to a chart to tell its story (i.e. when methodologies change, significant events happen, etc…) based on a dataset that queries a StripLineProperties table. Im using SSRS 2012, but I can’t for the life of me figure out the correct Assembly and Class entry to begin the custom code. Have you ever used the ‘System.Web.DataVisualization’ assembly in SSRS?
Paul, we have built some 2008 R2 SSRS reports and have run into the “No ActiveX controls in Firefox” issue with no Print button showing for the reports. I have located a plugin call ff-activex-host but not much else. Do you have any hints/suggestions on how my Firefox and Chrome users can print our SSRS reports?
Wayne, I’ve seen several programmatic approaches for printing reports. You can write a simple application that uses the RS web service to save a report or selected reports to a folder on the server in PDF or image format. We built a whole custom report menu app for a customer that included this capability. There are several different commercial apps or free script-based solutions that will look for files in a folder and then print them server-side. I’ve put some feelers out and will reply if I can find something more concrete.
Gary, this question comes up a lot and unfortunately there is no way to parameterize a shared data source connection string. The reason is that parameters are defined in a report and a shared data source runs at a level above the report. If you switch to using embedded data sources (contrary to “best practice”, I know), you can then build the connection string as an expression using parameters.
Paul
Your timing is excellent as usual as I want to use paramitorized data connection strings to create shared data sources. Can then be done in 2008 R2 or is this a new feature?