Reporting Services SP1 is installed, the installation went really well, and one feature that was in the beta is back: Excel "groups" (the plus/minus rollups in Excel). Believe it or not, this was one of the things that got my boss excited about Reporting Services as many of our managers are familiar with Excel, and when it dropped off in the RTM I had to go through and create some copies of reports specifically for an Excel export.
One strange thing is that there seems to be at least two means of creating expandable groups/hiding report items in the designer, for display in a browser. One way is to set the whole group to being hidden, and set a textbox as a toggle item in the "Grouping and Sorting Properties" dialog (figure 1), another is to set report row(s) as being hidden, toggled by the same textbox (figure 2).
Figure 1 |
Figure 2 |
The second method creates the Excel "groups" that made me and my boss so happy. I did have a small problem with some wording in the Reporting Services SP1 readme that said:
This service pack is independent of Service Pack 4 (SP4) for SQL Server 2000. If you are installing Reporting Services SP1 after SQL Server SP4 is released, Microsoft recommends that you apply SP4 first.
A search at Microsoft's "Service Packs for SQL Server" (http://www.microsoft.com/sql/downloads/servicepacks.asp) site showed there isn't any SQL Server 2000 SP4, yet, but I found clarification on the newsgroups at http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&frame=right&th=f7246d07373b6bb2&seekm=%23koDNGiWEHA.644%40tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl#link3 which had:
The readme was not meant to imply that you need to have SQL Server SP4
before applying Reporting Services SP1. You can apply Reporting Services SP1
now and then later apply SQL Server SP4 when it is released.
The newsgroups also saved me some headache with an error in Visual Studio after applying the Service Pack (it's for client PC's - report designers - as well as for the SQL Server/web server) which read:
Could not load type Microsoft.ReportingServices.Interfaces.CachedDataStatus
The solution was at http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&frame=right&th=b1ccf47d2cd15078&seekm=epuanhTWEHA.2544%40TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl#link7, which said:
Just out of curiosity, would you do a search under the hidden folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\assembly\dl2
for a file named
Microsoft.ReportingServices.Interfaces.*
If it's there, rename it and see if that resolves the issue. If it does, you may delete the file.
Overall a fairly painless experience, which has improved the functionality of an already pretty good application.
posted @ Friday, June 25, 2004 3:27 PM