Here at PASS I found a great opportunity to lobby for a few features in Reporting Services--mostly with the Report Designer BI tool. I also talked to the PMs handling the ReportViewer control--you know, the one that won't be able to manage 2nd generation RDL (the RDL generated by the new VS2008 SP1 BI tools) until 2010. They tell me that the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" so if you want the ReportViewer control to be fully functional I suggest you vote on the Connect bug I created to focus Microsoft's attention on this issue. Yes, I hear that with more budget, there is a "chance" that the RV control would be upgradable (at least partially) in the Spring... I would not hold my breath.
Report Designer Suggestions:
I like the BI Report Designer (but I liked the VS2005 Report Designer too) but the new one is more intuitive and handles data more like other VS wizards. Here are a few suggestions that might help everyone build reports more efficiently:
- Permit renaming DataSets: When one renames a DataSet in the Report Data window, the RDL is not properly updated. Yes, this is a known bug. No word on when it will be addressed. Work around? Open the RDL source and do a (careful) search and replace to the new DataSet name. Tip: Make sure you name the DataSet correctly the first time around.
- Make it hard to delete Shared Data Sources. As Peter and I tell developers in our best-selling book "Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services" it's important not to delete shared Data Sources in the Report Manager (or anywhere else). Unless you're willing to directly access the ReportingServices database there is no way (short of a complex SOAP procedure) to relink the DataSources with the reports. Because it's so easy to do this with the current tools, it makes sense to prevent developers from doing this accidentally--like when my cat Ink walked across the keyboard at an inopportune time.
- Permit "remap" for deleted shared data sources. This repairs the damage caused by the issue raised above.
- Parameter layout formatting. While it's possible to format virtually every aspect of a report, there is no way to change how the browser formats the prompting dialogs for report parameters. I suggested that when a report contains a defined Parameter, that the Design tab include a frame where the parameter prompting dialogs can be defined. I think this would make for far more professional-looking report interfaces as well as dealing with accessibility issues. Another attendee suggested putting the parameter dialogs inside the datagrid.
- PDF-preview margin controls: One of the most common export formats is HTML to PDF. Unfortunately this often results in broken pages as the PDF renderer has its own idea about where the margins should be placed. I suggest a PDF "window" that frames the report with the current PDF margins to make it very clear when the report as defined is too wide (or tall) for the PDF renderer.
- Black-and-white preview: Anyone who has used PowerPoint knows that it's essential to preview the slides with black-and-white rendering to show how the colors are going to appear when sent to a printer. I suggest a B/W preview button.
- Third-party control integration in the ReportViewer control: Of course the team was very clear that it would not make the client ReportViewer control extensible to permit the third-party community to help make client-side reports as rich as those rendered on the server. I still think this would help developers--especially if the only way these controls could be incorporated into the RDL was to do so with the RS BI tools and a Standard license.
- Faster load on Report Manager: Holy cow--I don't know of any application that takes longer to load than the Report Designer. SQL Server itself does not take as long. Microsoft needs to fix this issue. Yes, I hear that if one is judicious about choosing how the anti-malware tools scan the system temp directories one can improve performance. I’ve done this and it still takes far too long to load—or reload if the application times out.
- Fix the Report Project dialog: So what's up with this dialog?
- It's not sizable so the part of the TargetServerUrL cannot be seen. Scrolling is a PIA. This dialog also needs a way to easily deposit reports to a
hidden directory (like My Reports) to prevent everyone in the company from calling the developer pointing out mistakes as the report is being developed. - Fix the Report Wizard: Insert the right ReportServer name with the right instance name.
- Better support for the Solution Properties for SQL Server instances, My Reports, HTTPS and server names.
- Backup and restore reports: Dump selected reports to RDL and Import reports enmass. This would make me (and a lot of other developers) more comfortable about protecting the work they've created and reloading it when rebuilding the Reporting Services server. Peter’s suggestion takes this one (big) step further. He thinks there should be a wizard that build editable deployment scripts that target specific reports and servers. This wizard would consider the data sources as well as the way parameter defaults are handled.
- Expose Expressions: I think it would be handy to be able to see the contents of expressions as the developer hovered over the cell. That is I suggest exposing a ToolTip box to show the code behind the cell. I understand the cells can now be assigned a value to label the expression and that’s nice but we used to be able to see the first few characters of the expression—now it’s just “<expr>”.
- Export to SharePoint: If a company feels the need to migrate their reports and user configuration to SharePoint, I think it would be essential to have a wizard that loaded and configured the target SharePoint site without having to start from scratch.
- Restart the Wizard: For some developers getting started, it makes sense to have the ability to run the report definition wizard against an existing RDL report.
I spoke with you briefly at PASS. I am building my dashboards in VS2008 and publishing to RS2008 and viewing via the RS viewer webpart in a SharePoint dashboard. When I view the dashboard, the parameter fly-out covers half of my dashboard...I would much rather embed that parameter selection directly into the header of a report tablix or graph in Reporting Services 2008/VS 2008 instead of having a fly-out at the right side of the report.
Yes, I agree. This would be a useful feature. I think the way that parmeters are handled in the Report Designer (or any HTML rendering) is pretty simplistic and could use some other options to make them more usable and flexible in more sophisticated report layouts.