Reporting Services 2008 Report automatic upgrade gotcha.

-

For the Scrum for Team System project I have been focusing on the reports; I came across an issue which was due to the way the Reporting Services 2008 "automatic upgrade" feature upgraded our reports.

The Scrum for Team System template contains over 20 reports all written for Reporting Services 2005. This was done because Team Foundation Server 2008 only worked on SQL Server 2005 and Reporting Services 2005. Then in August of 2008 Team Foundation Server 2008 Services Pack 1 was released which added support for the Team Foundation Server 2008 is to run on SQL Server 2008 platform.

With Reporting Services 2008 there is a new reporting definition language schema. However reporting services does have backward compatibility method as describe below:

The report server will validate report definition file against the included reference to the RDL namespace which specifies the version of the report definition schema that is used.

The report is automatically upgraded the first time it is viewed, but the stored report definition file remains unchanged.

So if you edit the report from the server it will still remain in old schema and not the new schema.

To get automatically upgraded report definition you will open the report in one of the authoring tools: Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Microsoft Report Builder 2.0.

So I did some testing to see how the 2005 reports would look after the reporting services 2008 processing. I found that 2 reports didn’t render the same as did on reporting services 2005. The 2 reports had a common layout they were using a reporting services sleazy hack: The Green-Bar Matrix. The cell which controls the background colour was a lot more visible than the original as well as the text. So I rewrote the reports and were released them with version 2.2.

Then one of our template users reported that one of the other reports stopped working. The report started to give the following error:

The processing of Parent for the tablix ‘table1’ cannot be performed. The comparison failed. Please check the data type returned by the Parent.

I was able to trace the error to an option in one of the report define groups: Recursive parent, which can found under advanced; removing the option made the report worked again. I haven’t been able trace why the error happens it only seems when our data came back in a certain way which I am currently looking into.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Azure SQL Server IaaS SSIS: A required privilege is not held by the client

-
Image
As mention in a previous post, we are using Azure SQL Server IaaS to help our transition to the cloud. The main reason for this is how some of our SSIS projects, which we inherited, were created. Some were using SSIS to manage the transactions, which uses MSDTC not supported in Azure. Use extra .Net libraries to read JSON and office files; external programs to do file operations like decompression. Migration timelines and priorities we didn't have time to refactor these projects. While ago we started to deploy our SSIS projects to our Azure SQL Server IaaS virtual machine, a Windows 2019 server with SQL Server 2019, to get the following error: SSIS Deployment Error 6522 "A required privilege is not held by the client". We able to resolve our problem by using the steps we found in the following blog posts: System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: A required privilege is not held by the client while Deploying SSIS Project | Microsoft Docs . Fixing SQL 2012 SSIS Deployment Err
Read more

SSIS File handle leak in For Each Loop

-
I am currently working on a project which needs to load over a 1000 xml files. The files are stored across 10 subfolders. I am using a foreach loop with a file enumerator, which is configured at the top of the folder structure and traverses the subfolders. This loops through the files, load the data and then moves the file to another folder. The package executes fine for a few 100 files but then hangs; this happens after a different number of processed files each time the package is run. While trying to resolve the problem we ran performance counters and noticed that the number open handles increased significantly just about the time Dtexec looked like it had hanged and DTexec also then started taking a lot of the cpu processing time. Update: I put this on the Microsoft forums and got a intresting answer back See Here ; There seems to be a memory leak with foreach loop which should be fixed in sp1.
Read more

Cannot update a database that has been registered as a data-tier application

-
Within SQL Server 2008 R2 a new feature was introduced, which was the data-tier application database. This feature allow developers / database administrators to package a database schema so that it could be deployed to any other database server and versioned. More about this feature can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee240739(v=sql.105).aspx or http://dacguy.wordpress.com/ This feature has been included, as I have just found out, to previous versions: SQL Server 2005 via Services Pack 4 and 2008 via Services Pack 2. However SQL Server Management Studio, for SQL Server 2008, hasn't been updated with the tools for the new feature, you have to use the SQL Server 2008 R2 version. The reason for including the support to the previous version might have something to do with the release of the new SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), the replacement to visual studio database professional, which uses DAC Packs and the framework to deploy a database. I have been using the
Read more