Brussells Development Blog

I see a lot of questions asking how to set a report to show in landscape mode verses normal mode. It’s actually easier than you would expect. Simply view the properties of the Report Object, and modify the Page Size setting to read 11 x 8.5 inches as shown below.

Now save and preview in Print Mode. You should notice that your report appears to be in Landscape mode ( wider than higher ) so when a user views the report or hit’s print his default mode is set to Landscape. Easy as pie.

Enjoy !,
Brandon Russell

We recently released our latest version of our Web software here at work, which meant I’ve had some free time to learn more of the Advance features of Reporting Services 2005. One thing I wanted to check out was the subscription service. While playing with it I noticed that you could setup a schedule to have a report auto generated and then emailed to whom ever you choose.

The options available was a full To:, CC:, BCC:, Subject:, and Message: fields. Immediately I seen one of my most demanding tasks of running a custom monthly report and emailing it to the CEOs become one less thing on my plate. Long story short, the first of August the schedule fired off the auto generated report to the CEOs and CC’d me and my boss. It worked like a champ. I even told it to export it as a Adobe Acrobat format. I immediately received an email from one of the CEOs giving me praise for remembering it on time when he hadn’t and even taking the time to lay it out nice and neat in PDF.

It’s a shame he doesn’t know I let the server do all my work and I took credit, but isn’t that how it’s suppose to be =p ?

So if you haven’t had a chance to explore the capabilities of the Auto scheduler and Email functionality of Reporting Services, maybe you should. It could save some time on your demanding plate and bring a little more praise from your co-workers.

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 =).