Brussell's Blog

Well today I put the finishing touches on our reports to be used on the company website here at work. I must say after doing my first rounds with SSRS 2005 I have quite a few gripes about some features, or should I say “missing” features.

First off, basically you have 3 modes of reports when you break it down. The view you get rendered in a winapp, website, in viewer control. Next you have the exported version. And finally you have the printed version. To me, it would have been almost common sense to allow a property for components in reports that controls ifwhen they can be viewed in each mode. For instance, I needed to show a friendly info message on some of the top level reports that basically says “Hey, you click such-and-such and drilldown to more detailed reports.”. However, I didn’t intend for this to be displayed when printed out, it’s not necessary there. Well, there is no way to toggle visibility for what ever mode your about to render to though. *sigh* Sometimes it’s the most simpliest things in life that turn out to be the big bumps in the road =/.

Another gripe is not having an easier, more functional, way to restrictallow export functions for eachall report(s). For now I had to manually go into the rs*.config file on the Reports Web Server and manually turn off all the options the company does not want to allow users to have when exporting their reports. I’m sure there is a better way, I have yet to track it down though. I cought wind of allowing export options based on privilages, whether this is accurate I don’t know yet. I did however see other nodes in the XML config file just above the … tags though that may shed some light on this.

And yet one more gripe thats still pending on my mind is the fact that when exporting a report with drill-down(s) or subreports to EXCEL it gives error messages inside the EXCEL file for where the sub-reports are suppose to be instead of the actual report. I would rather have it not even render the error msg area at all and just show the report as it is rendered on screen. But I will have to research this bug some more for work arounds tomorrow.

My work for today is done …. there’s always tomorrow =).