The PivotViewer Extension for Reporting Services provides an application generator that enables users to effortlessly build dynamic PivotViewer Collections on top of Business Intelligence data, inside SharePoint 2010.

The CTP1 release can be found here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d31f609d-a353-41ad-a1a4-f81456e3a6c4

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Emi

The whitepaper contains all the needed information for setting up Kerberos Authentication in your environment, as well as step by step configuration instructions for a multitude of scenarios. One scenario in particular refers to the specific setting that need to be done in order to configure Reporting Services 2008 R2 Integration with SharePoint and ensure Kerberos Authentication and Delegation is set up correctly.

HTH,

Emi

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc765421.aspx - SQL Server Setup and Deployment Support and Information

This is a Solution-Based portal, a totally new approach for our technology-based portals, which focuses on aggregating the relevant SQL Server setup content as one of the key tools for ensuring successful deployment of SQL Server.

Today I'll talk a bit about the version 2.0 of the tool which brings some cool new features and also supports IIS 7.0.

A full list of new features and changes can be found here: https://blogs.iis.net/brian-murphy-booth/archive/2009/04/22/delegconfig-v2-beta.aspx .

However, I will concentrate on the coolest new feature - The Wizard.

The version 2 of the tool is set up in the same way the previous version was, which is basically configuring it as an ASP.NET Application in your IIS Server (Steps 1 - 5 from my previous post still apply).

The difference is that now, using the wizard, you can analyze a front-end other than the HTTP application which ran under the same application pool as DelegConfig. For the other nodes/hops, you can follow the wizard all the way to the backend, specifying for each step the type of service, port, identity to receive in the end a nice report displaying all the recommendations but also the option to fix a few of the detected issues - SPNs, Trust for Delegation.

So, on the main page you will have links to: Wizard, SetSPN page that allows you to add or remove SPNs, SetDelegation page that allows you to modify the Delegation parameters in AD for an account, Tests page which allows you to do a quick test of authentication in a double hop scenario to a SQL Server, File Server or Web Server.

Accessing the Wizard, will get you started with the wizard.

• 1. After clicking NEXT on the first page, you will be asked if the current application pool, the application pool under which we configured DelegConfig, represents our front-end. I will assume my front-end is actually on another machine, using a different account, so I will choose just Next without clicking the Yes Button (see below).

• 2. Service Type of Front-End page

This page allows me to configure the type of service for my front-end. I will assume for this example, an HTTP application.

• 3. Host Name

On this page we will configure the name used for accessing the service. If my http application would be configured with Host Headers so that the URL for the application would differ from the NetBIOS name, I would of course specify the HOST Header value. If my application would be published on https://contoso.internal.com/Front-End , the host name I would specify would be:Contoso.internal.com

• 4. Load Balanced.

This is a new feature allowing us check for configuration of Load Ballanced or Clustered services

• 5. Kernel Mode

If the service I'm adding currently is an HTTP class service, this page allows me to tell the wizard if I'm using the new IIS 7.0 feature called Kernel Mode Authentication (for more information: https://blogs.msdn.com/sudeepg/archive/2009/02/08/iis-7-kernel-mode-authentication.aspx ).

For this example I will assume I'm not using IIS 7 or Kernel Authentication.

• 6. Port Number or Instance Name

This page allows me to  configure the port used by my service or the instance name.

• 7. Service Account Name

This is the identity of my service. The SPNs would have to exist under this account and if this service needs to delegate credentials further to another service, this account would also have to be trusted for delegation. If the identity is NETWORK SERVICE, LOCAL SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE, the wizard will check the host computer's machine account in Active Directory.

• 8. Trust for Delegation

This is the step where we tell the wizard if this is the last service in the chain or not. If this service needs to pass credentials further, we would respond "Yes" to the question: "Does the HTTP service running on emilianb07 need to delegate ("pass") credentials to another server?"

• 9. Delegation Type

If we use constrained delegation, we will select "Trust this account for delegation to specified services only", otherwise we select "Trust this account for delegation to any service (Kerberos only)"

What will happen now is that we will go through each step up to the 8^th, to configure the 2-nd tier service. At the 8^th Step we will be asked again if the service needs to delegate credentials further. If we answer yes, we will configure yet another service, with the same information - type, host, port, identity, etc.  This repeats until we choose "No" at the step 8.

When this happens, the Next button will become "Finished" and when we click it, we will get our report.

The report will have a section for each node/hop, where we will get answers to the following questions:

"Is Domain Account?", "Has valid SPN?", "Has duplicate SPN?", "Trusted for Delegation?". If duplicate or missing SPNs are found we have the possibility to fix this by clicking on the "Fix this for me." button which will take us to the SetSPN.aspx page. The page will already have filled the suggested SPNs to be added so all we need to have is an account with enough privileges on AD to do the change.

The Same thing applies to the "Trust for Delegation" part, which will take us to the Set/Delegation.aspx page.

An "overall Status" paragraph contains answers to the questions: "Is Domain Account?" referring to the end user, "Authentication Method?", "Impersonation Level", "Will delegation Succeed".

However, if we run the delegconfig in an application pool other than the actual front-end and on a different machine, we can ignore this paragraph as it will actually check the Authentication method used for authenticating to the Tool itself rather than the actual front-end, and the impersonation level relative to the user accessing the DelegConfig tool. Therefore, the answer to the question "Will Delegation Succeed?" might not apply to the actual environment.

HTH,

Emi

On Reporting Services 2008,  we are exporting to excel a report with multiple row groups with visibility triggers on every group, the visbility being controlled by the parend group. This produces a report with interactive functionality - Expandable regions. While in HTML, the report looks and works fine, in Excel the last group will display a duplicate record below the data record.

Exemplified on an AW report, this behavor will look like below.

HTML Rendered Version:

Excel version showing doubled records:

The SQL Server Reporting Services (MSSQLSERVER) service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

The main reason for which this might happen is that the maximum allowed time for a service start operation has been surpassed. By default, the timeout is set to 30 seconds, which can be a little short in some situations. Therefore, the first thing to try would be to increase the timeout period.

As to the causes for which more time is needed for a service startup, for SQL builds lower than CU9 for SQL Server 2005 SP2 (9.0.3282), this issue might be caused by the fact that the service, before loading the assemblies, needs to verify the Certificate Revocation List from https://CRL.microsoft.com.

Having this in mind, the options you have for addressing similar behaviors are:

1.     Adding an entry to the HOSTS file (%Windows%\System32\Drivers\ETC) to direct the service to an invalid IP while trying to reach CRL.Microsoft.com. An example would be adding the following line:

127.0.0.1crl.microsoft.com

2.     Increasing the value that corresponds to the maximum time allowed for starting a service. Changing this value will have no negative impact, but require a reboot of the machine. This solution is described in the article: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/922918 , but in short, you must change (or create) the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control,ServicesPipeTimeout (DWORD) to specify a value sufficient to allow the service to start. This value represents the timeout in milliseconds. (An example of a valid value is 60000)

3.     Installing CU9 for SQL Server 2005 SP2 - https://support.microsoft.com/kb/953752 .

4.     Installing SP3 for SQL Server 2005

- Download page : https://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?familyid=AE7387C3-348C-4FAA-8AE5-949FDFBE59C4&displaylang=en   

- List of fixes: https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=955706

- Readme files: https://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?familyid=851C39EE-6F9D-47D9-8ECC-44AC1E9DC182&displaylang=en  

- Main page: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb895958.aspx

I hope to shad some light over this subject and try to explain why some of the text can be exported this way - Copy'n'Paste, and some of the text not and why this happens.

First of all I have to say that the Copy'n'Paste operation from PDF files exported from SSRS is not a supported operation. This means we don't expect this to work as the PDF rendering extension was never designed for this feature.

Having said that, let's see what has changed with CU6 for SQL Server 2005 SP2.

The reason for which Copy’n’Paste doesn’t work as before, after installing CU9 for SQL Server 2005 SP2 is the fact that with CU6 a new logic for dealing with complex text was implemented. After CU6, the decision whether a text is complex or not and is going to be encoded with Glyph IDs instead of ASCII, is done after a different logic than before, thus leading to more text being regarded as complex than before.
According to this new logic, adding a carriage return line feed character is enough to see this text as complex and encode it using Glyph IDs. Encoding the text using Glyph IDs leads to not being able to copy\paste the text anymore. This new logic was added to overcome a different limitation and cannot be reverted at this point.
Because this behavior changed first with Cumulative Update Package 6 - build 9.0.3228.0, any build prior to that should provide more copy/paste
functionality than we currently have. I must however stress that this still doesn’t change the fact that we don’t support this.

Also, SSRS 2008 brings a lot of improvement in the PDF rendering extension and the whole rendering engine. Therefore, you might find that SSRS 2008 behaves better in these situations than SSRS 2005. Still, Copy'n'Paste is not supported even in SSRS 2008.

Having had a lot of requests for this feature, the Product Group has taken this into consideration and is planning to include this functionality sometime in future releases. However we have no estimation yet on when this will happen.

Finally, you will find that text that can be easily encoded in ANSI, also behaves a lot better with Copy'n'Paste than text that contains special, font-specific characters.

HTH,

 Emi

When we encounter errors like: "ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.ExecutionNotFoundException: Execution 'n3uh3355xsgfrajxklix1m55' cannot be found" in the SSRS logs, these are related to the SSRS session.

Here below are the configuration options we have in terms of timeout control.

IIS\ASP.NET related:
- executionTimeout - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms824641.aspx  - in web.config for ReportServer. This is the maximum amount of time that it takes to process a SOAP message using the TCP protocol.
- Idle Timeout option on the Performance tab in the Application Pool used by Reporting Services in IIS Manager.

SSRS related:

- RecycleTime element in RSReportServer.config – this specifies the recycling period for the entire Application (SSRS Web Service). The default is 720 – in minutes.
- DatabaseQueryTimeout element in RSReportServer.config – Specifies the number of seconds after which a connection to the report server database times out. This value is passed to the System.Data.SQLClient.SQLCommand.CommandTimeout property. Valid values range from 0 to maximum integer. The default is 120. Setting the value to 0 is not recommended; it specifies an unlimited wait time. This is affecting DataSet queries inside the report.
- The SessionTimeout and SessionAccessTimeout system properties. These are the settings controlling the SSRS user session I mentioned in the beginning. The default value for these is 10 minutes, expressed in seconds (600). One could see the SessionTimeout value in the ConfigurationInfo table in the ReportServer database. To modify these system properties’ values you could use a simple script designed for RS.EXE like the one below:

Public Sub Main()
    Dim props() as [Property]
    props = new [Property] () { new [Property](), new [Property]() }
   
    props(0).Name = "SessionTimeout"
    props(0).Value = 3600
   
    props(1).Name = "SessionAccessTimeout"
    props(1).Value = 3600
   
    rs.SetSystemProperties(props)
End Sub

This sample will set the values to 3600 seconds which is too much in most situations. You would need to adjust these values to suit your needs.
For more information about this subject: https://blogs.msdn.com/jgalla/archive/2006/10/11/session-timeout-during-execution.aspx

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Emi

I can think of 2 separate issues and causes. First is related to the Web Service recycling and the time needed for restarting and reloading its components\assemblies. The second could be a question of response time for a report (the first time it is executed) and could be linked to the caching mechanism.
Below we look at the two different situations.

1. Problem caused by the loading of assemblies. NET after startup (restart) of SSRS Service.
Normally, a response time longer for the first service access SSRS after a restart of the service is normal. The behavior is observed even if the server and the service is not restarted but after a period of inactivity. This behavior can be linked to Recycle options for the IIS service.
One possible solution would be to check that the service is not restarted unnecessarily, and if it is still restarted, forcing the loading of components before users access it.
Full info on the topic of recycling:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb934330.aspx  - Application Domains for Report Server Applications

The article describes the two parameters that we have to control the recycling of SSRS: RecycleTime and MaxAppDomainUnloadTime (file RSReportServer.config).
Following a restart of the service SSRS to ensure that the assemblies and necessary components are loaded, and the service will be available to users, we can put a up a solution for a query similar to a PING to the service.
For this task we have several options:

- A script for RS.EXE (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162839.aspx )
- Use a .NET application to access Reporting Services SOAP API.

                https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms153968.aspx  - Integrated Reporting Services using SOAP API
                https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155131.aspx  - Using the SOAP API in a Windows application
- Use a simple application to access Reporting Services URL https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms154537.aspx  

2. Problem of execution time for a particular report, the first time.
A different time (longer) for the first execution of a particular report is normal. executions that follow (if the report is run with the same parameters) will take the report cache, and therefore the time performances will be improved.
The document https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc966418.aspx  - Planning for Scalability and Performance with Reporting Services contains a paragraph "Report Caching and Storage" on this subject.
We have the options:
- Loading the cache with the help of a subscription-driven data (Data-Driven Subscription) using the NULL Delivery extension.
Full Info:
                https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155927.aspx  - Caching a report in Reporting Services
                https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155876.aspx  - How to: preload the Cache (Report Manager)
- In the properties of the report, set the execution in order to use a cached copy. More info: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159241.aspx  -- Set the properties of a given report

HTH,

Emi

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Also, check out Evan Basalik's post on SQLBlog about this: https://blogs.msdn.com/sqlblog/archive/2007/11/09/reporting-services-staaaarrrrrtttt-up.aspx

Since a lot of people showed interest in the use of this tool, I thought I'd share some information on its use. Here’s where you can download the tool from: https://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1434