Defeading reporting services

By Henning Eiben in Software 0 Comment

I had a real hard time installing SQL-Server 2005 Reporting-Services on this one machine …

The MSI was executing just fine, but the step “removing backups” (don’t know the exact wording in english, since I’m using a german installation) seems to fail.

This is what the msi logfile has to offer:

Aktion 15:59:51: RSSP_CAInstall.28B19132_4741_4761_840F_AC515130EC08.
Aktion 15:59:52: RollbackCleanup. Sicherungsdateien werden entfernt
CA MSG : Running RSCustomAction
CA MSG : Launching C:\DOKUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOKALE~1\Temp\rsCustomAction.exe with command line parameter /i
CA MSG : rsCustomAction.exe failed to configure, Error code is: 1
Aktion 16:02:48: Rollback. Aktion wird rückgängig gemacht:

After much struggle I finally figrued something. First I installed SharePointRS.msi without the custom actions, by executing:

SharePointRS.msi SKIPCA=1

OK. So next I just run the rsCustomAction.exe (which is located in my temp-folder):

rsCustomAction.exe /i

This finally produced some logfiles and a more details error message. In my case the problem was, that the web.config of my portal-site was write-protected!!

After removing the write-protection I was able to install SharePointRS.msi just fine.

Reporting Services accessed via URL

By Henning Eiben in Programming 0 Comment

Well, a neat feature of MS Reporting Services (SSRS) is, that the reports can be called via a URL directly. This offers the option to “deep-link” into a report and preset all needed parameters.

You just simply need to browse to you reportserver http://[servername]/ReportServer/. From here on you can click right to your desired report. Then just add the needed parameters to the URL. There parameters are passed as key/value-pairs, so you need to know the ids of the parameters, as they are defined in the report parameters.

To call a report test.rs with the parameter customer_id and a value of 1234 you just call the URL http://myreportserver/ReportServer/Pages/ReportViewer.aspx?/test.rs&customer_id=1234. A little more difficult at first glancy might be multi-line parameters. Just add the parameter as many times as you wish. For example to call the above report, but having customer_id declared as a multi-line parameter and thus wanting to pass the values 1234 and 5678 just call [...]ReportViewer.aspx?/test.rs&customer_id=1234&customer_id=5678.