Why?
A friend asked me if there was a quick way to simply right-click on a folder in Windows Explorer and it would generate a text file with the contents of the directory he right-clicked.

What?
We can do this by adding an entry to the context menu (when you right-click on an object). The following is a method of adding this as a single command similar to how we add the "Command prompt from here" option (now built-in to Windows 7). I added this option for him in Windows 7 Ultimate using the system registry (see "How: for Windows 7" below).
copyraw
-- yield

a_subfolder_in_this_folder
a_file_in_this_folder.txt
another_file_in_this_folder.doc
  1.  -- yield 
  2.   
  3.  a_subfolder_in_this_folder 
  4.  a_file_in_this_folder.txt 
  5.  another_file_in_this_folder.doc 

How?
Category: Windows OS :: Article: 420

Thought I'd put a quick note here, I tried a fair few solutions that didn't work and then found this hidden away in a forum:

Quick Count
copyraw
=INT(SUMPRODUCT((A3:A1000<>"")/COUNTIF(A3:A1000,A3:A1000&"")))
  1.  =INT(SUMPRODUCT((A3:A1000<>"")/COUNTIF(A3:A1000,A3:A1000&""))) 

This returns the number of unique values in the range A3 to A1000 and excludes the blank/empty cells.

Display all Unique
Found this note on one of Microsoft Help sites:
Category: Excel :: Article: 418

What?
I installed Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS) and connected it to a Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) instance and set my working local folder to my home directory. When the rest of my colleagues installed it however, they decided to use a common local directory for all workstations so configuration files would not need to be modified.

So?
Once installed, my BIDS install would continuously check-out files and store these in the home directory. I tried the general settings (Tools > Options) but to no avail.

How?

What?
So I've spent a fun time googling and binging but still haven't found a simple and complete example of getting a resultset from an Oracle stored procedure and displaying this in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Well "non-productive" more than "fun" as most of the examples on the net are either half-complete or partially documented. So here goes...
  • Using Business Intelligence Development Studio v2008 (BIDS)
  • SQL Server Reporting Services v2008 R2 (SSRS)
  • Oracle SQL Developer v3 (you can use any equivalent, eg. SQL*Plus)

Why?
I think this is one of those very rare occasions that Microsoft people can say "it's so much easier using a Microsoft product to work with another Microsoft product" (ie "Seamless integration"). Yes, I'm trying to get an SSRS report to display the results from an Oracle stored procedure. I have a previous article describing a basic stored procedure in Oracle, this article aims to outline how to apply this to an SSRS 2008 R2 report.


What?
I have created an SSRS report which can compare 4 reports side by side and brings up their latest execution times to the nearest millisecond. The report has 4 parameters. Each parameter is a dropdown populated by a list of all available reports.

Why?
I want the report to be run with the 3rd and 4th parameter as OPTIONAL. When I leave the 3rd and 4th parameter untouched (="<Select a value>"), the report complains saying "Report #3 parameter cannot be blank!". Before you ask, I have ticked both "Allow Blank" and "Allow NULL".

How?
This is the tough part. I was reading up on the MSDN page for the closest solution but it still didn't work for me. But the idea of inserting a NULL entry to select sounded good.

Aim / Objective
The plan will be to replace the default "<Select a Value>" with a custom null entry and the end-user will be none the wiser.

Why?
I've recently written a report for SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 (SSRS) which will compare up to 4 reports and will compare the time taken for each one. The breakdown or what I was able to measure with the default installation are the times taken for "data retrieval", "processing", "rendering", and then the totals of these.

I haven't Googled this at the time of print so there may be a million better solutions out there, this is just how I did it. This may look like a horrible report which would fail an accessibility test but visually it says straight away which is the better report; and when comparing to the previous runs (using a second dataset) you can tell where changes were made and how this affected the reports' performance.

What?
What I'm trying to do is display a set of results (comparing various reports) in a table and then to color the backgrounds based on whether they are the fastest or slowest in the set.

Something like:
Displaying a color-based resultset


How to Display Report Execution Time in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2
So there are other articles out there but I was looking to display in milliseconds the execution time it took for a particular report (which searches for results matching the submitted parameter) to run.

Lifted from Dattatray Sindol's blog
Other sites have this solution as well so who copied off who is not my concern as this is not the solution to our problem. This is the solution that I initially used but my end-users were asking why is it always 0 seconds. This was because we were using the following MDX statement which had seconds as its smallest denominator:
copyraw
="Execution Time: " +
CStr(System.DateTime.Now.Subtract(Globals!ExecutionTime).Hours) + " hour(s)" + " , " +
CStr(System.DateTime.Now.Subtract(Globals!ExecutionTime).Minutes) + " minute(s)" + ", " +
CStr(System.DateTime.Now.Subtract(Globals!ExecutionTime).Seconds) + " second(s)"

// yields
// 0 hour(s), 1 minute(s), 2 second(s)
  1.  ="Execution Time: " + 
  2.  CStr(System.DateTime.Now.Subtract(Globals!ExecutionTime).Hours) + hour(s)" + , " + 
  3.  CStr(System.DateTime.Now.Subtract(Globals!ExecutionTime).Minutes) + minute(s)" + ", " + 
  4.  CStr(System.DateTime.Now.Subtract(Globals!ExecutionTime).Seconds) + second(s)" 
  5.   
  6.  // yields 
  7.  // 0 hour(s), 1 minute(s), 2 second(s) 
This isn't what I want... It wasn't accurate enough and always saying 0 seconds was just confusing the end-user...
Category: SQL Server Reporting Services :: Article: 401

Quick Reminder
I didn't want to do this at the database level, mainly because it meant modifying the SQL query. The zero padding would need to be applicable within an MDX query.

The Situation
We have a database using Oracle 10g, and a SQL Server Reporting Services v2008 R2 environment. My use for this was when displaying an audit log displaying the oracle errors.

Oracle Errors
An Oracle error usually returns in the format of -12345. If we want to look them up the error is ORA-12345. Unfortunately Oracle also returns errors of less than 10000 so ORA-00201 would actually be returned as "-201". As I wanted a link so that the user can just click on this link and it would take them to http://ora-00201.ora-code.com/.

Intro
If you ever want to check the parameters submitted with a report for alpha numeric characters (so it doesn't contain symbols, punctuations, etc) then you should do this at the database level, and then get the report to complete the check:

The Plan
  1. User enters value in parameters and clicks on "View Report"
  2. Report passes parameter to dataset which gets formatted by the database
  3. Report retrieves (select) formatted parameter as a field value to use
  4. Report loads with changes based on returned value.

The Gist
  1. Add database level parameter check
  2. Add IIF in SSRS to confirm


What?
We have a report in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 (SSRS) reading from an Oracle 10g database which works great and lists all the details on a specific student. An additional request is that there appears a link that will run a stored procedure which
  1. Updates a timestamp in an existing table
  2. Inserts a row into an audit table
I need the report to run the stored procedure, then based on the errorlevel, return a message.

How?

My Setup
  • XP SP3 Workstation
  • Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS)
  • SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 (SSRS)
What do I want?
I have a report displaying room bookings. Each row lists the day, date, room name, start/finish times, booking details and the staff contact. I want an empty row to appear between each day in the list, so I have:

The Problem
I've set some tablix headers but when I request the same report in PDF format, the tablix headers only appear once on the first page. Every subsequent page simply displays the report header (which does not include the tablix header... obviously). I right-clicked on the header row of the tablix and checked the box "Repeat header columns on each page.
This is not working!

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