SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Programming.
Roman Rehak.
SQL122
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Roman went through the web Report Manager since most in the audience hadn't seen Reporting Services before.
Can set Server and Item-level roles. Can create new roles.
Reporting Services is mainly a web service with all functions available for you to use. (Similar to yesterday's introductory session.)
Execution options to render report with the most recent data (with caching) or render the report from an execution snapshot.
Can create scheduled jobs and save as history.
Reporting Services licensed Dundas Reports. MS purchased ActiveViews report generating company (to make reports easier to generate in next version...)
Web Service Interfaces: item properties, report execution, parameters, report history, scheduling, subscriptions, etc.
Basic and NTLM Authentication from CredentialCache.
RS Scripting. (RS.EXE) Allows you to use VB.NET to call any method in any web service. C:\>rs -i MyScript.rss -s http://server/reportserver
Roman's renderreport.rss generates a report in EXCEL format. Can change output format simply.
Can create a DTS Package and call rs.exe as the Win32 executable.
Include rs:Command=Render in URL report generation.
Can use POST instead of GET.
Must include target=_self in the embedded sub-report link if you want to keep in the same window.
For Windows Applications, have to use MS Web Browser control with COM interop.
Check out RSExplorer (included sample app) to learn about RS.
Using the SOAP API, the rs. GetReportParameters forRendering property has to be true. (The parameter derived from a db query was not included in the search.)
Roman's Winforms sample SOAP API app used parameters as collections to cycle through a number of parameter variations to output 100s of reports. Definitely looking forward to looking at that code.
Roman covered Processing Extensions, an area highly unlikely for me personally to be investigating.
Summary: The presentation moved briskly and covered a wide range of RS app topics. Questions I had during the session were answered as the presentation proceeded. As I mentioned, Roman provides some excellent original code samples with good supporting materials. 10 out of 10.