Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

See if you read all the documentation about SSRS 2008 integrated mod, they pretty much ask you to create the reports in BIDS and go through the publishing steps or simply upload your Reporting services artifacts to the designated document libraries. This is nice and easy, but sucks big time!

First off , no offense , but the majority of those who deploy have absolutely no clue how to use BIDS! Secondly BIDS is not necessarily available on the production servers. Thirdly, there are many scary clients out there who don’t entertain anything except full automation of your development bits including your reports, data models, data source and etc. All this calls for an automated solution that takes care of deploying your reports and all of their dependencies.

Well, we have a problem though! While you can publish report definitions (.rdl) and report models (.smdl) to a SharePoint library, this does NOT apply to data source (.rds) files! That’s exactly what design tools (i.e. BIDS) do under the hood! During publication, design tools create a new .rsds file from the original .rds file and publish that file instead. They literally convert the .rds file to its .rsds counterpart which is pretty contains same content but in different schema! This process very much resembles to what InfoPath publishing wizard does by turning UDC files into UDCX files for browser-enabled forms.

Truth to be told, if you want to fully automate your deployment, you should write your own converter and perform the deployment by utilizing SharePoint feature framework and SSRS proxy endpoint (ReportService2006.asmx). I am not sure how difficult it was for the SSRS team to provide another web method that takes a .rds file and publish it to a SharePoint document library!! The functionality is there and is used by design tools, right? They just didn’t expose it to us!

Okay, I just wrapped up a POC that demonstrate how you can accomplish this. You can download the code here.

1. Craft up a project and include the shared data source and all of your reports like below:

BTW, I am using WSPBuilder for this project.

2. In feature.xml, put in the following CAML code snippet:

As you can tell, in the feature manifest, I am referencing the RsProducts.rdl and DtSourceNorthwind.rds files as ElementFile inside ElementManifests node.In this blog post I am assuming that each feature pack contains multiple reports,but share one data source. If you have other reports which don’t share data source, just create more features. Who cares? Too many features?!! Well, you can hide them all and use a hub feature that when gets activated, activates all of the child features; so does the deactivation. No worries!

One more thing about the feature above. Since I am using Data Connection Library and Report Library to host my SSRS artifacts, there is this activation dependency to ensure that enterprise feature is already turned on.

Let’s move on and have a look at the code in the feature receiver:

[CSharp]
public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
{
SPWeb web = properties.Feature.Parent as SPWeb;
ReportingService2006 rs06 = new ReportingService2006();
rs06.Url = web.Url + “/_vti_bin/ReportServer/ReportService2006.asmx”;
rs06.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
…
}
[/CSharp]

In the FeatureActivated method, I first initialize the SSRS Proxy endpoint which has already been nicely virtualized and context aware by SSRS Add-in for me. Security context under which this Web service call gets executed is determined by how you set up SSRS authenitcation mode in the Central Administration site. Read my post here.

[CSharp]
string featurePath = string.Format(@”{0}\FEATURES\{1}\”, SPUtility.GetGenericSetupPath(“Template”), @”Top20Products”);
string[] reportPaths = Directory.GetFiles(featurePath, “*.rdl”);
string[] dataSourcePath  = Directory.GetFiles(featurePath, “*.rds”);
if(dataSourcePath.Length != 1)
throw new Exception(“Oops!Only one shared datasource per feature pack or there is no datasource”);
[/CSharp]

So the plan is I can simply copy reports and their shared data source over to the feature folder so when feature gets activated I can call ReportService2006.asmx to publish reports, create the data source and finally fix up the data source reference in the deployed reports. Since the report and its data source is already deployed to the feature folder , I can simply get a reference to the files on the WFE server.

[CSharp]
XmlNode extensionNode = null;
XmlNode connectStringNode = null;
XmlNode rptDataSourceNameNode = null;

fileName = Path.GetFileName(dataSourcePath[0]).Replace(“rds”, “rsds”);
stream = File.OpenRead(dataSourcePath[0]);
XmlDocument dsDOM = new XmlDocument();
dsDOM.Load(stream);
stream.Close();
rptDataSourceNameNode = dsDOM.SelectSingleNode(“RptDataSource/Name”);
XmlNodeList connectionPropertiesNodes = dsDOM.SelectNodes(“RptDataSource/ConnectionProperties”);

foreach (XmlNode node in connectionPropertiesNodes)
{
extensionNode = node.SelectSingleNode(“Extension”);
connectStringNode = node.SelectSingleNode(“ConnectString”);
}

DataSourceDefinition dsDefinition = new DataSourceDefinition();
DataSource dSource = new DataSource();
dSource.Item = dsDefinition;
dsDefinition.Extension = extensionNode.InnerText;
dsDefinition.ConnectString = connectStringNode.InnerText;
dsDefinition.ImpersonateUserSpecified = true;
dsDefinition.Prompt = null;
dsDefinition.WindowsCredentials = true;
dsDefinition.CredentialRetrieval = CredentialRetrievalEnum.Integrated;
dSource.Name = rptDataSourceNameNode.InnerText;
string parentDataSourceLibrary = “http://mossdev/DemoDCL”;
string fullDSUrl = string.Concat(parentDataSourceLibrary,”/”, fileName);
rs06.CreateDataSource(fileName, parentDataSourceLibrary, true, dsDefinition, null);
[/CSharp]

As you can tell, in the receiver class I am loading the .rds file into an XMLDocument object which I can then traverse to programmatically create the equivalent .rsds data source. Please be noted that for simplicity sake, I am just converting a simple data source (look st the source code), but be my guest if you’d like to deserialize .rds data source into a full-blown business object to cover more complex data source types. I am just trying  to keep the POC focused on the topic and simple!

Quite frankly, I don’t care about setting data sources properly during deployment. You can just create dummy data sources, reference those in your reports and when everything gets deployed, just go to the Data Connection Library and fix up the data sources. As part of the integration, you have the ability to set data source properties right from SharePoint UI. Plus , you should always be using shared data sources as much as possible so supposedly there shouldn’t be crazy number of data sources in your deployment.

I also hardcoded the parentDataSourceLibrary path that points to a Data Connection Library. You should either programmatically create the Report and Data Connection library in your feature receivers or use the same ( or another) feature to create these doc libs using CAML. I assumed that lists are already there. what a lazy a$$ I am 😉

[CSharp]

Warning[] warnings = null;
foreach (string rptPath in reportPaths)
{
fileName = Path.GetFileName(rptPath);
stream = File.OpenRead(rptPath);
Byte[] definition = new Byte[stream.Length];
stream.Read(definition, 0, (int)stream.Length);
stream.Close();
string parentReportLibrary = “http://mossdev/DemoReports”;
string fullReportURL = string.Concat(parentReportLibrary, “/”, fileName);
CatalogItem item = rs06.CreateReport(fileName, parentReportLibrary, true, definition, null, out warnings);
foreach (Warning warning in warnings)
{
//Proceed with logging the warnings
}
DataSource[] catalogItemDtSrcs = rs06.GetItemDataSources(fullReportURL);
DataSourceReference reference = new DataSourceReference();
DataSource dsNew = new DataSource();
reference.Reference = fullDSUrl;
dsNew = catalogItemDtSrcs[0];
dsNew.Item = reference;
rs06.SetItemDataSources(fullReportURL, catalogItemDtSrcs);
}
[/CSharp]

At the end we just publish the reports again to a hardcoded Report library named “DemoReports ” and fix up the wrong data source references. That’s basically it. just Build & Deploy the project. Upon successful deploy , you should see a Web scoped feature that when gets activated , injects the data source into a Data Connection Library called DemoDCL and the report to a Report library called DemoReports.

*The source code for the sample we did in this blog post can be downloaded here.

*If I get a chance next Weekend , I will craft up a PowerShell script which does pretty much the same thing  but without utilizing the feature framework. I will keep you posted here!

1/2 a great rest of your weekend 😉

Although when installing SSRS 2008, you get an option to install in “integrated mode”, “native” or “Install, but configure later”, there is always this question that if I have setup my report server in the native mode how easy it would be to :

1. Switch my report server to the integrated mode
   
2. Switch my report server databases to the integrated mode
   

Okay, let me take a pause and answer the second question first because it is easier! You cannot shift your databases from native to integrated mode or vice versa. Report server databases contain mode-specific data and currently there is no process that I am aware of, to convert them over to the other mode. This means that if you’ve setup your report server in native mode and you’ve published your reports, once you make the switch, you ought to publish everything again to the new report server. Period!

However, the first question calls for a more visual kind of answer; therefore the main focus of this blog post. I have categorized the steps you require to take into two sections.

I) SSRS configuration Steps:

1) Fire Reporting Services Configuration Manager.

2) Connect to the right instance of the report server that you want to convert.

3) On the Service Account tab, choose the right service account under which SSRS windows service must be executed. There is this fantastic table here that provides service account recommendations for different deployment scenarios. Read up for yourself!

4) On the Web Service URL tab, change the tcp port, apply SSL if required. Don’t forget to click on Apply button if you change anything on this screen. Here is what you should see in the result pane:

Read more…

When you configure SSRS 2008 to run in SharePoint integrated mode, the way you configure authentication and permissions in your SharePoint Web application matters a lot, because:

1. That’s what report server uses to control access to report server items and operations.
   
2. This would dictate what kind of security model you can use in your reports data sources to access external data sources.
   

Figure 1: Authentication settings for your Web application is an important step in the integration

Having SharePoint to perform authentication and access control doesn’t mean that SSRS is unaware of the security context under which reports gets executed. The report server uses an internal component called security extension (only available in SharePoint integrated mode) to query WSS object model to find out whether or not the requested resource or operation can be performed for the passed in security context.

Figure 2: Security extension queries SharePoint OM to check for permissions

Read more…

As you can see , I’ve started to gradually blog my notes that I have gathered so far with regards to installing SSRS 2008 in an integrated mode with MOSS 2007 , also including the solutions and workarounds if possible. Here is a tricky one:

Before we performed the integration , we had provisioned a SharePoint Web application and extended it to an internet zone. We used domain user account for the application pool of this Web application ;therefore for its extended Web application. Default zone was configured to use Windows Authentication and extended zone with our custom auth provider.

** Snapshots are from an environment I used to replicate the issue**

We went ahead and performed the exact configuration steps on both report server and SharePoint WFE server. We also used domain user accounts for services accounts  all the way through as recommended here and verified that integration is in a healthy state. I documented part of our verification tests here.  In the Reporting Services Integration tab in the Central Administration site We specified Windows Authentication.

Read more…

Unless you are living under the rock , you’d probably know that since SQL Server 2005 SP2 time frame , you can configure a deployment of SQL Server Reporting Services to work with a deployment of SharePoint – known as SSRS 2008 installation in SharePoint Integrated mode. In the first attempt to combine their Business intelligence and Information Portal technologies together and by releasing SQL Server 2005 SP2 , Microsoft brought two very interesting technologies together and opened up a world of interest to many people including myself . When I first read about SP2 , I was like wait a minute, this is awesome!  Both products that I had been really passionate about for years now are getting much closer! Needless to say that I’ve always appreciated the  efforts Microsoft has put into making the technology , geekyness and weirdness around it transparent to the vast majority of people out there.

When SQL Server 2005 SP2 was released , MS really demonstrated that not only do they listen to their customer feedback, they also care so much about developers and to make their life easier. For example , in the context of SharePoint and SSRS integration , now you can potentially hire a report developer,they can build the reports (in much easier way) and publish them into SharePoint and basically hand them over to the  user community and business users. From here , they can take the wheel, manage and interact with these reports (high level) without having to know what the hell is going on under the hood! Isn’t that amazing that how two completely different technologies can be combined to make things much easier for everyone? Remember, easier something is, more people will use it. More people use it, more popular you’ll become! Microsoft ,for sure, has proved that they’ve learned this very simple rule of life…

The only thing that tipped me over the edge at that time was when I first attempted to bring the the best out of both products in a “real” integration project with a very “difficult-to-get-along” kind of client! (I still have the  nightmare of those two days) .  I really don’t want to talk about those issues here , but what made it difficult for me was no  proper documentation , no active community around both products  and , to an extend,  the immaturity of the integration . Things certainly have changed since then and obviously I’ve learned my “integration” lessons as well! Not that I don’t face any issues these days, but nowadays it’s much easier to find an answer – and yes , I find the answers to the majority of my questions in the blogs of those who are blessed and willing to SHARE their POINTS with the rest of the world!

When SQL Server 2008 and SSRS 2008 was RTMed , I didn’t make the same mistake I had made back in 2005 🙂 . I decided to to gain some home-based lab experiences before I go live with this in real engagements (Didn’t I just tell you that I learnt my integration lessons? 😉  ) Surprisingly, every installations I had at my home-based farms from a single stand-alone installation to a scale-out SSRS  along with a large SharePoint Server farm went really smooth without big stucking points. Documentation around the integration is much better this time around, but I am still not happy by the coverage of SSRS 2008 and SharePoint integration by MS people and community! Let’s hope it gets better soon.

Speaking of SSRS 2008 Add-in for SharePoint, here is one question that I frequently get asked :

I have configured report server in SharePoint integrated mode. I have installed SharePoint Web front-end components on the report server computer.I have downloaded and installed the Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies on my other  Web front-end servers (including the one that hosts the Central administation site) , but Reporting Services section doesn’t appear in the Central Administration site;therefore I cannot complete the integration.  Where did it go?

Well , the answer is : You need to activate a site collection-scoped feature called Report Server Integration Feature on the Central Administration site.

This feature has two different behaviors when gets activated on Central administration site than other sites. When activated on the Central administration site , the feature does all of the things it does for other type of sites , plus it adds a section  called Reporting Services under the Application Management. This section must be used to make sure SharePoint is aware of my SSRS instance existence. Here is where the fun part starts 🙂 .

Read more…