July 27, 2020 at 8:09 am
Hi guys
Can one preview a report without it having to open up an URL?
Kind regards
July 27, 2020 at 5:21 pm
If you have the RDL file, you can open that in Visual Studio.
Alternately, if you don't want to open a report URL, you could build a tool that essentially opens the web page in a .NET application. Technically opening in a URL still, but for the end user it doesn't look like a URL being opened. And in a C# application you could have the report rendered prior to displaying it to the end user and therefore it wouldn't feel like opening a URL.
Apart from that, not a lot you can do for opening a report as you need something to render it and here your options are visual studio or the SSRS web services. I am not aware of anything else that will display this.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
July 29, 2020 at 3:36 pm
I've created VB.Net desktop applications that render an SSRS report that is on the SSRS server, using an extension to Visual Studio that allows an SSRS Report Viewer Control to be inserted into a form and programmatically controlled, so yes, you can do the same in C#, or you can open a report URL in a browser. I'm pretty sure Brian is right that there aren't any other options available.
Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
Rent Servers for Income (picks and shovels strategy)
July 29, 2020 at 3:40 pm
I forgot about one - power pivot inside Excel. Using that you can pull the data from the SSRS server into Excel. Still technically uses the SSRS web stuff and requires the SSRS web site to be set up and running, but you can scrape the data off of the SSRS website into Excel and refresh it with the "data refresh" button.
Downside to this is that the report parameters need to be static.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
July 29, 2020 at 3:43 pm
Brian,
Seems like it would probably be easier to just export the report in Excel from the URL in your browser. Have to admit I've not touched Power BI yet, and given that you're saying the parameters would have to be static, that might be rather limiting...
Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
Rent Servers for Income (picks and shovels strategy)
July 29, 2020 at 4:01 pm
Disadvantage to exporting to Excel from the SSRS site is that you get a static output of the report. Nice thing of Power Pivot is you can click a button and get a refreshed view. You can pick parameters when you are pulling it into Power Pivot, but if you need to change parameters, you need to adjust that in which case exporting from SSRS is going to be less painful.
I am not sure if PowerBI can pull data out of SSRS (I expect not as that sounds like quite the headache). Also, Power BI is not the same thing as Power Pivot. Power Pivot is a feature/addon for Excel. Addon in older versions, feature for Excel Professional in 2016 and higher (may be the same with 2013, but pretty sure 2010 and earlier it was an addon).
I THINK you could also export the Atom file from SSRS and then use the atom file in Excel, but that's something I've never got to work successfully.
Oh, another limitation of doing it in excel is if you have too many parameters in your SSRS report it can throw cryptic errors. I think the full URL needs to be 255 characters or fewer. And it is surprisingly easy to go over that limit.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
July 29, 2020 at 6:37 pm
Disadvantage to exporting to Excel from the SSRS site is that you get a static output of the report. Nice thing of Power Pivot is you can click a button and get a refreshed view. You can pick parameters when you are pulling it into Power Pivot, but if you need to change parameters, you need to adjust that in which case exporting from SSRS is going to be less painful.
I am not sure if PowerBI can pull data out of SSRS (I expect not as that sounds like quite the headache). Also, Power BI is not the same thing as Power Pivot. Power Pivot is a feature/addon for Excel. Addon in older versions, feature for Excel Professional in 2016 and higher (may be the same with 2013, but pretty sure 2010 and earlier it was an addon).
I THINK you could also export the Atom file from SSRS and then use the atom file in Excel, but that's something I've never got to work successfully.
Oh, another limitation of doing it in excel is if you have too many parameters in your SSRS report it can throw cryptic errors. I think the full URL needs to be 255 characters or fewer. And it is surprisingly easy to go over that limit.
Yep, my bad on Power BI vs Power Pivot. Too much exposure to hearing about the BI and not about Power Pivot. Anyway, wanted to ask what, exactly, is the Atom file in SSRS ? I've been working with SSRS since 2008, and never heard of it...
And yup, an SSRS URL can easily go WAY past 255 with a large enough number of parameters, or particularly for a case with multi-valued parameter(s?) and a large number of values.
Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
Rent Servers for Income (picks and shovels strategy)
July 29, 2020 at 6:57 pm
heh... now you have me second guessing myself on that atom file thing... Been forever since I used that as I found it to be unreliable and annoying to work with, but in the save dropdown (when enabled) it shows up as "Data feed" and gives you a .atomsvc file type. We have that disabled on our live server, but enabled on test at the moment.
Then using Excel (I forget the exact method for it, but I remember it being possible) you can set that as a data source and it will pull data out of SSRS. If I remember right, that file has the same 255 character limitation in the URL, but I THINK that if it goes over, it just truncates it rather than giving you an error.
Not sure when it was introduced, but we have SSRS 2016 and the option is available.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
July 29, 2020 at 7:20 pm
It was introduced in 2016 for data feeds. Usually it's referred to as data feeds or atom feeds. You generate data feeds from reports using the Atom extension. You click on the Export as Data Feed button from the menu and the atom extension generates a file atomsvc - but it doesn't have any data in it. It's an XML file that points points to the URL for the data, has info about the data. In Excel you do Insert -> Pivot Table -> Use External Data source and then browse to the file. It works to import the data feed - if you know what you are doing 🙂
Sue
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