SSRS - Joel Lipman .Com

Returning Oracle Stored Procedure Resultset in SSRS

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 19 January 2012; Hits: 40302

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.

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 14 December 2011; Hits: 24662

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.

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 02 December 2011; Hits: 14007

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:

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 17 November 2011; Hits: 35099

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:

copy raw

="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)

="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)

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

SSRS Zero Padding

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 10 November 2011; Hits: 201416

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/.

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 07 November 2011; Hits: 10893

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

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

The Gist

Add database level parameter check
Add IIF in SSRS to confirm

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 04 November 2011; Hits: 11111

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

Updates a timestamp in an existing table
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?

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 26 October 2011; Hits: 9445

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:

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 26 October 2011; Hits: 13605

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.

SSRS External Images don't display

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 19 September 2011; Hits: 53162

The Situation
We want some photos taken from another website of ours to display in our report. These are not stored locally on the Reporting Server because other services use these photos on our Intranet and we only want one location to upload the photos. These images are provided via a website address (http) or network share (file).

Before you ask, we have several MS Sharepoint sites but we didn't go down the route of uploading 10000+ images into a Sharepoint database though we are still considering it; so this article is more about just getting external images to display when they are provided over an authenticated URL (You shouldn't be having any issues with this if the image is available to anonymous users - eg. Google Logo).

Our Setup

Windows XP Workstation
Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS)
SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Server (SSRS) running on Windows Server 2003
Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS)

Problem #1: Image does not appear within SSRS
When previewing the report in BIDS, the photo appears fine. If we deploy the report to our Reporting Server and attempt to view it using a Web-Browser, the image does not display:

Get report to see images hosted on an external URL
Check if image exists to display alternative placeholding image.

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 02 September 2011; Hits: 16698

I'm storing a note here because it took a while to figure out and googling other solutions did not answer our questions but did lead us to a workaround.

So this is regarding an error when trying to add parameters to a Stored Procedure of an Oracle database from within Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

The Error

copy raw

ORA-00911: invalid character 
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_UTILITY", line 114 
ORA-06512: at line 1 (System.Data.OracleClient)

ORA-00911: invalid character
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_UTILITY", line 114
ORA-06512: at line 1 (System.Data.OracleClient)

The Situation
I'm using Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 to develop a Reporting solution on a Windows XP workstation. We are connecting to a SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Service (SSRS) with Team Foundation Server 2010. The database with our stored procedure is Oracle 10g.

The Stored Procedure
Rather than a returned dataset, our Stored Procedure updates a field in one of our Oracle tables and returns nothing. It accepts 3 parameters: The StudentID (reference) varchar2, Username (who's running the report) varchar2 and a JobID (request reference) number.

Category: SQL Server Reporting Services :: Article: 380

: Joel Lipman; SQL Server Reporting Services; 12 August 2011; Hits: 10904

What?
This article serves to describe several workarounds or proofs of concept.

Why?
We have a first report which acts like a search page. You enter the student you are looking for by reference or name and if there is only 1 result in the results page, then we want it to redirect to the details report for that student automatically.

How?
So there are various solutions out there, here's an overview of some:

Method #1

Create one report with all selectable reports as subreports - toggle visibilty based on parameter.

Method #2

Add a button below "View Report" linked to some script code (requires change to ASP pages on the ReportingServer, ie. affects all reports on that server).

Method #3

Use ASP instead of SSRS.

Method #4

Use a TimeInterval refreshing the page after a certain time.

Conclusion
In the end, this came down to a design decision. Time spent on trying to find a solution was not considered to be warranted. My reports use a parameter for the connection string to specify which server and database to connect to and the follow on link was enough as a solution. My seniors advised that if we had time in the future we could expand on this further.

Google Searches that got me nowhere: