RS 2005 Books Online Note

Hey, guys. I'm going over BOL for SQL 2005 and found an interesting note about the new Reporting Services.

Upgrading Reporting Services Components Together

Reporting Services includes client and server components. If you upgrade server components, you should also upgrade all client components accordingly. This is especially true of the Report Designer. Although it is possible to run the SQL Server 2000 version of Report Designer with a SQL Server 2005 report server, you might see a disparity between report preview in Report Designer and how the report is rendered at run time. Note that once you upgrade Report Designer, you can no longer use it to publish reports to a SQL Server 2000 report server. Report namespace differences prevent publishing to both versions of the report server.

They've changed quite a bit of stuff in the new version of RS. I'll post little notes about what I find out as I discover it. Maybe I can find something useful out about the chart controls and print functions.



Catadmin - MCDBA, MCSA
"If a person is Microsoft Certified, does that mean that Microsoft pays the bills for the funny white jackets that tie in the back???

 

[ookete]

Nice. Unfortunately with my company, they will probably adopt SQL Server 2005 in 2008! <cry>

 

[TheBlondOne]

its pretty much the same for me but maybe we can start to get clients onto SQL Server 2005, but I can't see that happening anytime soon, especially as a lot of sites still use Crystal Reports 8.5.... Best get me sales head on then.

)

Some more info on 2005 would be great though Catadmin, it will be good to see a developers view on it too instead of the usual reviews that software gets i.e from people who built the thing...

-Steve


"if at first you don't succeed, sky diving is not for you"!!! )

 

[Catadmin]

ACK!!! Just found another little tidbit of information on this upgrade business that is VERY IMPORTANT, imho. I hope the authors of future RS books plan on warning people about this caveat in the first chapter.

During an upgrade, Setup removes any components that are replaced by new components in the SQL Server 2005 release. The following list describes which components are upgraded or removed. For more information about how to choose a component in Setup, see Installing Reporting Services Using Setup.

Report server, Report Manager, and the report server databases are upgraded.

Report Designer is uninstalled and replaced with an installation of Business Intelligence Development Studio. In SQL Server 2005, Report Designer runs within Business Intelligence Development Studio. The previous version, which runs in Visual Studio 2003, is uninstalled and the program files are removed from your system.

Reporting Services Books Online is removed. In the new release, product documentation is included in SQL Server 2005 Books Online.

Important:
If you installed the documentation refresh, be sure to uninstall it before upgrading. You must do this step manually. Although the upgrade feature removes the documentation files, it does not remove the program item from Add / Remove programs.

Samples are removed. New versions are available through Setup.

Administrative command line tools are removed. Note that rsactivate.exe is no longer used or installed in this release.

Catadmin - MCDBA, MCSA
"If a person is Microsoft Certified, does that mean that Microsoft pays the bills for the funny white jackets that tie in the back???

 

[Catadmin]

More info...

RS2k5 will no longer support the "Me.Value" in expressions. An Error BC30456 will occur if that phrase is used. The actual value must be used, such as Fields!FirstName.Value.

3rd party .Net data processing extensions (DB2, Oracle, etc.) will fail if the db credentials are passed on a connection string and the unattended execution account is not configured. This includes IDBConnection, but excludes IDBConnectionExtension. -- Not sure what this means since I don't use third party stuff, but I thought I'd mention it.

Support is enabled for Multi-Valued Parameters. Currently, an MV Param only shows the first parameter. This changes in 2k5 where you can see all the values. HOWEVER, this might also break the single value parameters, so any reports that call single value params should be doublechecked for issues.

A parameter property can be updated without resetting all its properties now. Default values are also no longer set to NULL if the DefaultValues property is unspecified.

When you have multiple header rows, the row height is now variable and no longer set by the height of the first header row.

Leading blank spaces are no longer allowed in Role definition names, but those role definitions that currently have leading blanks (for upgrade purposes) will still work. CAVEAT - The DeleteRole will automatically delete any roles with leading blanks if you use it, so make sure to rename your roles before using it.

More info to come...



Catadmin - MCDBA, MCSA
"If a person is Microsoft Certified, does that mean that Microsoft pays the bills for the funny white jackets that tie in the back???