Tag Archives: ssrs 2008

ExcelWriter, Knowledge Base, OfficeWriter, Reporting Services, WordWriter

Reporting Services Error: Report must be created with OfficeWriter Designer version 3.8.1.85 or later

Problem

When a report is exported from SSRS 2008 after upgrading to OfficeWriter 4.x, the following error message appears:

OfficeWriter report was deployed to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 must be created with OfficeWriter Designer version 3.8.1.85 or later. This report was created with version [version number] and must be run on SQL Server 2005 or earlier.

Solution

There are two known causes for this message, depending on the [verison number] of the Designer:

Designer version 3.8.x – 3.9.x

Full support for SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 was officially introduced in OfficeWriter 4.x. Exporting reports that were designed with an earlier version of the OfficeWriter Designer to SSRS 2008 will result in the error message above.

This message indicates that the report needs to be upgraded with a later version of the Designer.

To upgrade a report:

  1. Follow the instructions for removing the old version of the Designer and installing the new version of the Designer.
  2. Open the report in the new version of the Designer.
  3. Save or publish the report from the OfficeWriter Designer toolbar.

This will make several changes to the RDL to make it compatible with SSRS 2008.

Designer version 4.x

This is a known issue that occurs when the following conditions are met:

  • The report was created in Visual Studio 2008 for SQL Server 2008
  • OfficeWriter Designer version is 4.5.0
  • OfficeWriter v4.1.0 is deployed on the report server

The solution is to upgrade the OfficeWriter on the server from v4.1.0 to v4.5.0 or later.

NOTE: We generally recommend that the version of OfficeWriter on the server matches the version of the OfficeWriter Designer.

SSRS

SSRS: Improve Performance by Automating Report Caching Using Null Delivery Provider

If you’re familiar with subscriptions in SQL Server Reporting Services, you may have wondered what the “Null Delivery Provider” is for. While it may seem odd to deliver the reports to a black hole, it does come in handy from time to time. In this post, I’ll show you how the “Null Delivery Provider” can help you increase performance by automatically creating cached reports. The basic idea is to create a data-driven subscription to run the report with a number of different parameter values to build the cached copies. This is similar to creating Execution Snapshots, but in this case we can specify a number of different sets of parameters, where as Execution Snapshots allow only one set of parameters. The “Null Delivery Provider” allows you to do this without having to save the reports somewhere, taking up valuable disk space, or have them emailed to someone, taking up valuable sanity.

In case you’re not familiar with cached reports, SSRS lets you create copies (or “caches”) of a report after the data has been gathered, but before the report has actually been rendered. When a user runs the report, it’s rendered from the cached copy which already has all the data. This means the queries don’t have to be run every time the report is generated. If you’d like to read more about report caching, there are some good articles on MSDN.

This example uses the Product Line Sales SSRS 2005 sample report. Everything for this example still works the same in SSRS 2008. Continue reading SSRS: Improve Performance by Automating Report Caching Using Null Delivery Provider →

SSRS

Adding Web Reference to SSRS 2008 in Visual Studio

To add a reference to SSRS 2005 in Visual Studio, you’d specify the URL to the Web Service definition file, for example
http://server/ReportServer/ReportService2005.asmx or equivalently http://server/ReportServer/ReportService2005.asmx?wsdl. You can use a shorter alternate URL, http://server/ReportServer/ReportService.asmx. If you open these URLs in a Web browser, you’d be able to view the content of the ASMX file.

With SSRS 2008, I’d expect to use the same URLs, replacing 2005 with 2008 where applicable. Alas, it doesn’t work that way. If you browse to http://server/ReportServer/ReportService2008.asmx, you’d get a directory listing rather than the expected Web service definition. A quick check of the MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportServer directory reveals that the only relevant Web service definition file is ReportService2005.asmx. Further, the ReportService.asmx file has been inexplicably removed. Continue reading Adding Web Reference to SSRS 2008 in Visual Studio →