Category: Reporting Services

Regis Baccaro shows how to change the user language in SSRS 2016:

Changing it to Spanish and refreshing the browser changed the SSRS user language to Spanish without me having to add a language at all.

To change the user language of SSRS 2016 you need only to change the Formatting Region setting from the control panel – nothing else !

The issue I tend to have with this is that different tools tend to behave differently when you start changing the format settings.  I recall Excel being particularly finicky about it.

Andrew Notarian notes that Reporting Services reports still aren’t Section 508 compliant, even in 2016:

Last weekend I spent some time creating very basic tabular reports in SSRS 2016 to see how they handle accessibility, WCAG and Section 508 issues. It looks like things are largely unchanged since the first SQL 2008 Service Pack which introduced the AccessibleTablix property to the various render options (See this prior post). Now you will want to add the AccessibleTablix item to your HTML4, HTML5 and MHTML renderers. You will get tags linking the detail cells to the header but you will still be lacking a few of the items needed to pass a WCAG audit with flying colors (e.g. TH tags in the header row).

That’s a shame.

Simon Sabin has thoughts on Reporting Services 2016:

I recently installed SQL Server 2016 on my surface to get all our SQLBits reports sorted. What I couldn’t figure out was why it was so quick. I thought it might be because it was a local install and running on an SSD based surface but that couldn’t account for the blazing difference with previous versions.

Well the answer is much better.

I am looking forward to Reporting Services 2016, even though I rarely use SSRS anymore.

John White shows that the Sharepoint Integrated vs Native mode has shifted in SQL Server 2016:

This situation remained exactly the same in SQL Server 2014, but has changed dramatically with SQL Server 2016. SSRS in SQL Server 2016 contains significant advancements, chief among them are a new HTML5 rendering engine, a new report portal, mobile reports, and (soon) Power BI Desktop rendering. This is fantastic news, but it also changes the game significantly with respect to the Integrated/Native mode decision. With SSRS 2016, most of the new investments are in Native mode only – the balance has shifted. The table below shows an (incomplete) list of new features, and their supported modes.

You still need Integrated mode to read Power View reports, and John mentions a few places where Native mode falls short, so take the time to plan out which is right for you.

Microsoft quietly announced SQL Server 2016 RC1 is available:

In SQL Server 2016 RC 1, we made enhancements to SQL Server Reporting Services, including:

• Updated preview of the new web portal: The new web portal by default, and the classic Report Manager now removed.  Additionally, open the Mobile Report Publisher and Report Builder from the new web portal using any modern browser.

• Custom branding: Customize the web portal with your organization’s logo and colors.

• KPIs and mobile reports: Click a KPI and see a view with more details, and connect KPIs and mobile reports to parameterized datasets.

• Modern paginated reports: Design beautifully modern paginated reports with new, modern styles for charts, gauges, maps and other data visualizations.

It looks like Reporting Services is getting to release shape.

James Anderson shows off mobile-friendly reports in SSRS 2016:

To install Mobile Report Publisher, click the down arrow in the SSRS portal and select the Mobile Report Publisher. Download the installer and click through to the end. Install the C++ redistributable. If you have used DataZen then the designer will look very familiar.

It’s nice seeing Reporting Services all grown up.

Jeffrey Verheul has a post showing how to automate Reporting Services report generation in .NET:

But SSRS can also have text-fields as input for your report. These can also be added to the URL. Just like the parameters above, you just add the parameter name and value to the URL: “http:// [servername] :80/ReportServer/Pages/ReportViewer.aspx?%2fTest%2fTestReport&From=2015-12-01&To=2015-12-08&FreeText=This is a test…&rs:Command=Render”.

After some testing I’ve found out that you can use any character in the text parameter you want to, except for the &-sign. If you use that, SSRS will think it’s a parameter or command and won’t accept the URL. And there’s also the (browser) limitation of the URL length. Testing proves that the limit is 7926-7931 characters. If your URL is below 7926 characters, it works like a charm. If you go above that (between 7926 and 7931) the behavior of SSRS gets buggy, and above 7931 characters SSRS will throw an exception.

The trick here is that SSRS has a nice web service, so once you’re familiar with it, generating reports is easy.

James Anderson shows off paginated report improvements in SSRS 2016:

Anyone who has used SSRS in the past has probably been slightly frustrated with the lack of control for parameter positioning. It was possible to have some control by manipulating the ordering of the parameters, but for 2016 we have a new interface to define the positioning. It’s basically a grid onto which parameters, along with their labels, can be placed.

The big one for me:  HTML 5 support.  I remember spending so many hours trying to figure out why reports wouldn’t display in Firefox correctly or why they sometimes wouldn’t work at all (because the report builder executable wasn’t installed correctly or that one time there was a bug in the executable)…and that was before mobile took off as a serious platform.