Reporting Services – Curated SQL

The Value of Datasets in SSRS

Published 2024-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) uses the object type of a data source as the basic unit of connecting a data source to a report. (See this tip – SQL Server Reporting Services SSRS 2017 Data Sources) A data source is the connection details that allow a report designer and report consumer to define where the data lives and includes items like a table in SQL Server or an API. Continuing this concept, the dataset is the basic object that defines the structure of the data to be loaded and establishes a collection of fields.

Read on to dive into the properties of an SSRS dataset.

Showing SSRS Reports in Modern .NET Apps

Published 2024-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastiao Pereira solves a problem:

Report Viewer was originally developed for the .NET Framework. As the industry shifts towards .NET Core, developers who have traditionally relied on this tool have faced challenges displaying reports within their applications due to compatibility issues. Is it possible to display a report from SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) in a .Net Core Application?

Click through for the answer. As a quick note, we had .NET Core, but then Microsoft renamed it to .NET with .NET 6, so instead we have to differentiate .NET Framework (Windows-only, heavy SDK) with .NET (nee .NET Core, cross-platform, less heavy). I’d rate Sebastiao’s solution a workaround, but one that I doubt Microsoft will ever provide a better solution for, given the heavy de-emphasis on Reporting Services over the past several years.

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Constrained Kerberos Delegation with SSRS and Power BI Gateways

Published 2024-10-07 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards doesn’t want just anyone to double-hop:

Ok, many of you will already be aware that in order to use Integrated Authentication successfully with SSRS particularly, that you have to configure Kerberos Authentication. At a very basic level, this allows the credentials of the user running the report, to be passed to the report server (hop 1) and then along to the target of the SSRS datasource (hop 2), also known as “Double hop” authentication. The delegation part of this signifies where the service (PBIG or SSRS) is allowed to pass these credentials along to.

anywhere, ie…Unconstrained delegation, or

to a restricted set of targets…Constrained delegation.

Read on to see how you can set up constrained delegation.

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Security Practices for SQL Server Reporting Services

Published 2024-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Scott Murray locks down a service:

What are the various security ramifications when deploying and managing Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)? What are some of the best practices when setting up security within SSRS?

Read on to learn more about to configure SQL Server Reporting Services in three separate tools: the SQL Server Reporting Server Configuration Manager, SSRS itself, and even SQL Server Management Studio.

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Including a SQL Query in an Expression in SSRS

Published 2024-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin shares a tip:

Why: Most of the time, when you want a flexibility of your SQL query you can use parameterization. However there might be a situation when you’d need to build a dynamic query. In my case I used SQL query within an expression to feed it to multiple data sources targeting different servers with the exact same query.

Read on to see what Slava has fought with in the past.

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Migrating Multiple SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt doesn’t do things one at a time:

A few weeks ago I released a blog post about migrating SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports. At that point in time, I wasn’t aware of any way to migrate multiple SSRS Reports in one go.

Meanwhile, I have done some research and experimented a bit. In this blog post, I will be going through 2 different ways to migrate multiple SSRS Reports at once to Power BI.

Click through for Olivier’s findings and how you can migrate en masse.

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Getting Last-Used Report Parameters for SSRS

Published 2023-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Brian Bønk shares some history:

A couple of years back I needed to find the latest used parameters from a reporting services – SSRS (yes, it is old!) report. The functionality was to find the latest used parameters for all parameters dynamically and use them as the default values for each parameter in the report, when tjhe user opened the report. If the uesr had not used the reprot before, it should ask for the parameters.

This was a alot of fun for me to do, as I needed to query the internal tables from the reporting services database. The tables ExecutionLogStorage and the Catalog was on play. This due to the fact that I needed the active user’s latest used parameter values from each specific report and this in runtime when the report was opened.

Click through to see how Brian did it.

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Working with Power BI Paginated Report Subscriptions

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenland performs a conversion:

As a first step, I tried to “migrate” an example report from SQL Server Reporting Services to Power BI. In a previous blog post, I described the steps required to migrate successfully. You can find that blog post using the following link: Converting SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports.

In this blog post, I will look at the subscription functionality for Paginated Reports.

Read on for the process, as well as one limitation (and workaround).

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Converting SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports

Published 2023-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt makes a move:

In this blog post, we will be going through the process to convert a Reporting Services report to a Power BI Paginated report and deploy it in the end.

For this blog post, I have created a very basic SSRS report named Product Sales Overview. This report gets his data from an Azure SQL Database which contains the default dummy database (AdventureWorksLT).

Read the whole thing. It makes me wonder, though, if there’s an automated process for doing these conversions, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of reports.

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SSRS 2022 Updates

Published 2022-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Cookie McCray shares some updates:

Back in 2020, we announced the deprecation of Report Server features Pin to Power BI, Mobile Reports, and Mobile Report Publisher. These features will be removed from versions of SQL Server starting with SQL Server 2022 and will no longer be supported. Only the last three releases, SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2017, and SQL Server 2019, will be supported in maintenance mode until EOL (End of Life) for existing customers.

There are some interesting things in here but nothing that makes me say Reporting Services has a real future.

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Category: Reporting Services